The Affordable Care Act has saved countless families with medically complex children, including columnist Jennifer McLelland’s. Her son was born without a functional airway and quickly racked up more than $1 million in medical bills. The ACA protected her family– but these protections are not guaranteed.
For Lisbet Pérez, the restorative justice framework helped her family heal after leaving an abusive relationship. She was skeptical at first, but soon found a way to reconnected with her children’s father.
Through the process, she learned that her family could grow and heal through their own resilience, and that leaning on the support of her community would create the safe environment her children needed.
When it comes to marginalized communities, there’s a historically justified suspicion of formal organizations.
But there are solutions that all groups using restorative justice approaches can implement to be more inclusive.
With the help of a faith-based restorative justice program in Los Angeles I was able to choose forgiveness and find healing for myself and my son.
I made a decision that I was not going to raise my son with hatred. I was going to show him grace in an empowering way. It became my goal to bring about restoration.
Trixie is a young woman in her mid-20s who recently left an abusive relationship with a boyfriend. She came to my workplace, Walnut Avenue Family & Women’s Center, in Santa Cruz, seeking help from our restorative justice program.
What she was looking for wasn’t an accountability process for her abusive ex-boyfriend, but a means of addressing the trust broken by her friends who didn’t believe that the abuse was real.
California and Canada have about the same number of people – 39 million in California, 35 million in Canada. Both jurisdictions legalized medical aid in dying in 2016. Both have similar medical systems.
Yet in 2022, 13,241 Canadians took advantage of medical aid in dying, while only 853 Californians did so. Why the big difference?
The developmental disabilities service system is developing a Master Plan for Developmental Services.
We want to create a plan focused on equity for a community that is as diverse as our state. It should build on lessons learned over many years to create meaningful improvements to the systems that serve our community.
I spent a recent afternoon querying three major chatbots on some medical questions that I already knew the answers to. I wanted to test the kind of information that AI can provide.
“How do you go surfing while using a ventilator?” I typed. It was an obviously silly question. But Meta’s AI suggested using “a waterproof ventilator designed for surfing” and “set the ventilator to the appropriate settings for surfing.”
Our doctors are experiencing an alarming mental health crisis. Approximately one physician dies by suicide each day in the United States — a rate twice that of the general public and a loss that means a million patients lose their doctor to suicide each year.
A question about mental health on licensure applications must be amended to promote a healthier medical community.
California, through the Master Plan on Aging, has led the nation in recognizing the unique and increasingly urgent needs of older adults.
But Gov. Newsom’s recently released budget proposal for the 2025-26 fiscal year could cut aging and disability-focused programs. We’ve heard firsthand from older adults, people with disabilities and family caregivers about the challenges in accessing support and affordable housing. Many people feel left behind by the system.