It’s no secret that the nation is suffering from a mental health crisis. At the same time, we have a vast shortage of therapists.
As an administrator at a mental health practice in the Central Valley, I know firsthand how unnecessarily challenging it can be to find qualified professionals to meet the demand.
Trust for Public Land annually ranks park systems across the 100 most populated cities in the United States. Those in California’s Central Valley often rank near the bottom: Fresno ranks 97th. Bakersfield is 85th. Stockton ranks 77th.
Stockton and other Central Valley cities can improve their ranking with the help of California’s budget surplus. When we build parks in neighborhoods that don’t have any, we change the lives and futures of generations to come.
Although California has set high standards for controlling some chemicals in water, actual enforcement and removal of contaminants is generally slow, and frequently stymied by high treatment costs and antiquated water infrastructure.
Meanwhile, polluters rarely have to answer for the health impacts their actions may have caused. Low-income communities of color are particularly hard hit, due to decades of environmental racism.
California’s San Joaquin Valley is one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, but unfettered groundwater pumping has caused the land to sink and the regional canal system to break.
If the agencies in charge of the canals don’t fix them, water deliveries will continue to be affected, impacting everyone from farm owners to low-wage farmworkers.
In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp. Corcoran is sinking.
Over the past 14 years, the town has sunk as much as 11.5 feet in some places — enough to swallow the entire first floor of a two-story house and to at times make Corcoran one of the fastest-sinking areas in the country, according to experts with the United States Geological Survey.
COVID-19 is now on track to become one of the top 10 causes of death in the United States in 2020. And people with underlying conditions like respiratory diseases are at increased risk for severe illness and death.
This is bad news by any standard, but terrible news if you happen to live in an area such as California’s San Joaquin Valley where the pre-COVID death rate due to chronic lower respiratory disease is 12 times higher than that of the rest of the state.
As Californians across the state shelter at home amid the COVID-19 outbreak, an estimated 1 million of them lack access to clean drinking water, one of the most fundamental resources for maintaining health and hygiene.
Many of these residents are concentrated in rural parts of the state, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, where dozens of small public water systems fail to meet safety standards.
As chief medical officer of the largest public health plan in the Central Valley, serving 335,000 Medi-Cal patients, I am very worried about our vulnerable members.
We have to act now to flatten the infection curve and save lives, including those of our health care professionals. This is particularly crucial in this part of California. In the Central Valley, we have been battling a severe, long-time shortage of doctors and nurses.
It’s not unusual for Debra Rush to receive a late night phone call from law enforcement agents who have just completed a human trafficking bust and need her help caring for trafficking survivors. When Rush rescues a young survivor from one of these situations, she knows all too well the horrors they’ve endured.