Many parents of children with special needs — regardless of race — struggle to receive prompt diagnoses and services. But for families of color, the challenge is more acute.
“There’s just a lot of systemic racism,” said Kausha King, director of the Community Empowerment Project, a program that provides navigation support and training to Black families of children with special needs in Alameda and Contra Costa counties.
When I started my pediatric training, I expected to see kids with “typical” complaints, such as asthma attacks, ear infections, lacerations or maybe a COVID-19 case. Instead our emergency department was flooded with children and teens who suffered from anxiety, suicide attempts, and suspected physical or sexual abuse.
At least 10 times a day, the best care for my patients was for them to see a psychiatrist or a social worker.
Suppliers and parents began reporting shortages — most notably of ventilator circuits — early in the pandemic. Now, they say the problem is ongoing and kids are paying the price.
Based on national estimates, it’s likely that California is home to about 35,000 children with medical complexities, although no one tracks state-specific data. These are children with chronic conditions that require significant medical attention and specialized equipment, such as ventilators.
Health outcomes, including how long people live and their quality of life, are powerfully influenced by community conditions like the availability of parks and open space, high-quality schools, healthy food, affordable housing, and clean air and water. In fact, what happens in the community environment has a greater impact on health than what happens in the doctor’s office.
Prop. 15 would channel a large amount of money into schools and local services that can improve community conditions.
At the California Health Report, we want to make sure any voting problems in our state are investigated and made public. To do that, we’re partnering with the nonprofit, investigative news service ProPublica and newsrooms across the country to collect tips from readers about challenges they’ve experienced during the voting process.
The project, Electionland, includes a tip line that eligible voters can use to report issues that come up when casting absentee ballots or voting at the polls.
To get services for their children, parents often must navigate a dizzying array of health care providers, special education entities and insurance programs, often with little support or guidance.
By the time these children receive treatment — which is often contingent upon getting a diagnosis — they may have missed out on a critical window of time during which interventions can be most effective.
Even driven therapists face major hurdles navigating the fractured U.S. health care system. The end result is that they have less time to actually provide mental health care, at a time when therapists are needed more than ever.
Statewide statistics, as well as reports from providers and patients, suggest that insurance companies create hurdles to mental health care. Clients still struggle to get equal access to therapy. Therapists still struggle to get equal pay.
COVID-19 is exposing a hard truth about our communities: If the low-wage workers cannot obtain decent health care, everyone else is at risk.
That’s because many of the lowest-income Californians hold essential jobs in retail and other services where they regularly interact with the public. The UC Berkeley Labor Center estimates that up to half or more of California’s workers are considered essential. And California’s health care safety net that serves many of these workers will soon become more frayed.
We are physicians and leaders of the largest federally qualified community health center in the nation, located in East Los Angeles. The communities we serve are disproportionately experiencing the worst health outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic.
These deaths are unacceptable. We believe it is our duty as health care leaders to educate and inform our patients on the importance of registering to vote, more so in this election than ever.
California is close to revising a rule that excludes family caregivers from unemployment.
If signed into law, the bill is expected to extend unemployment eligibility to more than 119,000 family caregivers, who are primarily low-income women of color, according to a home care workers union. Supporters say that’s only fair, given that people employed as in-home caregivers who are not family members do receive unemployment benefits.