Community
Stories from the circle
Forty years of caring for twelve neighborhoods produces a lot of stories. These are some of them: the programs, the people who run them, and the people they are for.
COMMUNITY HEALTH · LATEST
1,200 volunteers, one Saturday, free screenings countywide
Health in the Parks put blood pressure cuffs, vision charts, and vaccines into sixteen neighborhood parks on the same morning. Here is what the day found.
OUR PEOPLE
Meet the nurses who never left — four decades at Balboa
Three nurses arrived at Balboa within eighteen months of each other in the early eighties. All three are still here. We asked them what kept them.
GROWING
Balboa Heights clinic opens with 40 new primary-care slots a day
A neighborhood that waited eleven weeks for a routine appointment now waits nine days. The new clinic on Cortez Avenue opened this month.
ACCESS
The bus that brings the mammogram to the car park
A screening unit that parks outside supermarkets and churches has raised mammography rates in four postcodes where they had been falling for years.
COMMUNITY PROGRAMS
A kitchen where the prescription comes with the recipe
Six weeks, eight people, one stove and a cardiologist who does the washing up. The teaching kitchen at Mission Hills has run for two years, and it is not really about food.
OUR PEOPLE
The reunion where the nurses do not recognize anybody
Once a year the NICU graduates come back. Some are three years old. One is thirty-one and brought his own daughter.