Becker's Hospital Review: ISMP Tapped To Create California Medication Error Reporting Protocol 
The Institute for Safe Medication Practices will build the first state-required medication error reporting system for community pharmacies in California following its selection by the California Board of Pharmacy. The program stems from a law enacted in 2023 that requires licensed community pharmacies in the state to confidentially report medication errors that reach patients, according to an April 30 news release from the nonprofit organization. The goal of the system is to help collect information that can help to reduce mistakes and improve pharmacy practices. (Murphy, 5/2)

Berkeleyside: Sutter Opens New OB-GYN Clinic At Berkeley’s Ed Roberts Campus
As it prepares to close its Berkeley hospital for a major new medical complex in Emeryville, Sutter Health has started bolstering outpatient services in the city, including this week’s opening of OB-GYN services in a new clinic at the Ed Roberts Campus, across from the Ashby BART station. The Adeline Care Center will provide comprehensive OB-GYN care, including prenatal and postnatal services, ultrasound imaging and a lab. Services will grow over the next six months as space renovations are completed. (Rauch, 5/2)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Death Of Premature Baby Prompts Lawsuit Against Grossmont Hospital
Why would a hospital with a licensed neonatal intensive care unit allegedly turn away an expectant mother in pain and just six months into her pregnancy? That question is at the heart of a civil lawsuit recently filed in San Diego Superior Court against Sharp Grossmont Hospital in La Mesa that alleges wrongful death, medical negligence and infliction of emotional distress and seeks unspecified monetary damages. (Sisson, 5/4)

Becker's Hospital Review: CommonSpirit CMIO Heads To Kaiser 
Dale Gold, MD, is stepping down as chief medical informatics officer for CommonSpirit Health’s Mountain Region to join Kaiser Permanente Medical Foundation. In a May 2 LinkedIn post, Dr. Gold said he will serve as the foundation’s next chief medical informatics officer. He was appointed to his current role at Centennial, Colo.-based CommonSpirit Health’s Mountain Region in September 2024. (Diaz, 5/2)

San Diego Union-Tribune: UC San Diego Medical Students Change Lives - And Get Crucial Experience - In Tattoo Removal Program
Since she was a child, Maya Shetty knew she was going to be a doctor. So, as a first-year medical student at UC San Diego, she and five classmates jumped at the opportunity to volunteer for their school’s new Clean Slate Free Tattoo Removal Program. The unique program at UCSD puts medical students in front of patients and in clinics as early as their first year. (Lunetta, 5/5)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Should Doctors With Addictions Be Allowed To Get Confidential Treatment? 
Despite opposition, Assembly Bill 408, legislation sponsored by the Medical Board of California, passed its second committee hearing Tuesday and is headed for a hearing before the Assembly’s Appropriations Committee, tentatively scheduled for May 14. (Sisson, 5/5)

San Francisco Chronicle: UCSF Guaranteed Income Study Halted By Trump Cuts Before It Concluded
Tremon Chandler, a 25-year-old from Ohio, moved to San Francisco four years ago with $3,000 in his pocket to chase his dream of becoming a rapper. Quickly realizing his savings would not go far in California, he slept in his car and crashed with a co-worker before finding housing. But life stabilized when Chandler enrolled as a participant in the Black Economic Equity Movement, a clinical trial run by UCSF, which aimed to measure the impact of guaranteed income on local Black young adults. (Bauman and Lee, 5/4)

Bay Area News Group: Bay Area Universities In Chaos Amid Research Funding Cuts
Stanford University doctoral student Delaney Smith was thrilled late last year to learn she landed a prestigious National Institutes of Health grant to fund her final two years of studies in biochemistry. Recently, though, Smith received word that her application – representing over six months of work – had been canceled before her funding was finalized. (Gibbs, 5/5)

Stat: Trump Proposes Billions In Cuts To Federal Health Agencies From NIH To CDC
President Trump on Friday proposed massive cuts to the federal government’s health agencies in his 2026 budget request, arguing that Congress should reduce spending by tens of billions from current levels. The request would be a 26% cut to the Department of Health and Human Services’ discretionary budget, which doesn’t include spending on health coverage programs like Medicare and Medicaid. The proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year, which starts in October, is a request to Congress and is rarely passed without major changes. (Payne, 5/2)

CBS News: Worker Safety Agency NIOSH Lays Off Most Remaining Staff
Nearly all of the remaining staff at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health were laid off Friday, multiple officials and laid-off employees told CBS News, gutting programs ranging from approvals of new safety equipment to firefighter health. Much of the work at NIOSH, an arm of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had already stalled after an initial round of layoffs on April 1 at the agency ordered by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Tin, 5/3)

Politico: More Than 15,000 USDA Employees Take Trump's Offer To Resign
At least 15,000 Agriculture Department employees have taken the Trump administration’s offers to resign, according to a readout of a USDA briefing with congressional staff that was shared with POLITICO. The departures represent a drastic contraction of a department that handles a diverse portfolio including flagship federal nutrition programs, food safety, farm loans and rural broadband initiatives. (Brown, 5/3)

The New York Times: V.A. Mental Health Care Staff, Crowded into Federal Buildings, Raise Patient Privacy Alarms
In a Boston V.A. hospital, six social workers are conducting phone and telehealth visits with veterans from a single, crowded room, clinicians say. In Kansas City, providers are planning patient care while facing each other across narrow, cafeteria-style tables in a large, open space, according to staff members. ... The cramped conditions are the result of President Trump’s decision to rescind remote work arrangements for federal employees, reversing a policy that at the V.A. long predated the pandemic. (Barry and Nehamas, 5/4)

The New York Times: Trump Administration Slashes Research Into L.G.B.T.Q. Health
In keeping with its deep opposition to both diversity programs and gender-affirming care for adolescents, the administration has worked aggressively to root out research touching on equity measures and transgender health. But its crackdown has reverberated far beyond those issues, eliminating swaths of medical research on diseases that disproportionately afflict L.G.B.T.Q. people, a group that comprises nearly 10 percent of American adults. (Mueller, 5/4)

AP: Cuts Have Eliminated More Than A Dozen US Government Health-Tracking Programs
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s motto is “ Make America Healthy Again,” but government cuts could make it harder to know if that’s happening. More than a dozen data-gathering programs that track deaths and disease appear to have been eliminated in the tornado of layoffs and proposed budget cuts rolled out in the Trump administration’s first 100 days. ... Among those terminated at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were experts tracking abortions, pregnancies, job-related injuries, lead poisonings, sexual violence and youth smoking, the AP found. (Stobbe, 5/4)

Stat: MilliporeSigma To Add Tariff Surcharges On Products Shipped To The U.S.
MilliporeSigma, one of the largest suppliers of medical research products, will start adding a temporary tariff surcharge to all product orders shipped to the United States. (Silverman, 5/2)

Bloomberg: Trump Seeks To Lower Drugmakers’ Medicaid Prices To Pay For Tax Cuts
President Donald Trump has set his sights on the pharmaceutical industry to shoulder part of the cost of his tax cuts, pressing congressional Republicans to force drugmakers to accept lower prices on prescriptions covered by Medicaid. Trump asked House Republicans to mandate the government health program for low-income and disabled Americans get the lowest price for drugs that certain foreign countries are charged, the White House confirmed in an email to Bloomberg. (Cohrs Zhang, 5/2)

San Francisco Chronicle: Breast Cancer Memorial In Golden Gate Park First Of Its Kind In Nation
The $1 million memorial garden at a park overlook is the first since the AIDS Memorial Grove opened 34 years ago.  (Whiting, 5/4)

Voice of OC: OC Library Wants To Show You How To Eat Healthy
Eating healthy can be confusing to some. Whether it’s learning to read nutritional labels on foods or jumping on fleeting health trends, understanding nutrition takes time. Yet the Irvine-based, Partners4Wellness, says that once you empower a person with food literacy, it can make all the difference. (Plawner, 5/2)

The Oaklandside: Oakland Head Start In Turmoil As Director Is Removed Suddenly Without Explanation
The director of Oakland’s Head Start program was removed from her position last week, leaving advocates and staff concerned about the fate of the early education program in the city. Diveena Cooppan was one of two Head Start employees placed on leave Friday, April 25. Cooppan had been in her role since 2019. In a statement to The Oaklandside, city spokesperson Sean Maher confirmed that two Head Start employees were placed on administrative leave, but did not share why or who could be replacing them. (McBride, 5/2)

San Francisco Chronicle: A Few Troubled Homeless People Are Disrupting This Wealthy S.F. Neighborhood. What Can The City Do?
Screaming and harassing merchants and shoppers. Defecating in commercial corridors. Threatening pedestrians on and around Chestnut Street. Suffering in the streets for years while refusing offers of shelter. That’s the behavior that residents and shop owners in San Francisco’s tony Marina district say a handful of troubled unhoused people exhibit and that the city seems unable to address. This small group only represents a portion of the 120 or so unsheltered homeless people in the district, but they’re suffering needlessly and making life difficult for the neighborhood, neighbors argue. (Angst, 5/4)

The Washington Post: U.S. Preparedness Agency Hires Scientist Who Pushed Failed Covid Drug
Steven J. Hatfill, a virologist and White House adviser during President Donald Trump’s first term who pushed hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus despite what most researchers said was a lack of scientific evidence, has joined the second Trump administration in a senior role at the Department of Health and Human Services. Hatfill will begin his second week Monday as special adviser in the director’s office at the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, a small agency responsible for preparing the U.S. for disasters such as pandemics and biological and chemical attacks. (Sun, Rein and Johnson, 5/4)

CBS News: Weekly Measles Cases Hit New Record Amid Worst Outbreak Since 1990s
Weekly measles cases have set a new record, according to figures published Friday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, topping the peak of an outbreak in 2019 that ranked as the worst since the 1990s. The number of cases that had their symptoms start during the week of March 30 has grown to 111, according to the agency's latest update. Authorities backdate newly reported measles cases based on when their rash began, to account for delays in reporting and diagnosis. (Tin, 5/2)

AP: CDC Reports 216 Child Deaths This Flu Season, The Most In 15 Years
More U.S. children have died this flu season than at any time since the swine flu pandemic 15 years ago, according to a federal report released Friday. The 216 pediatric deaths reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eclipse the 207 reported last year. It’s the most since the 2009-2010 H1N1 global flu pandemic. It’s a startlingly high number, given that the flu season is still going on. The final pediatric death tally for the 2023-2024 flu season wasn’t counted until autumn. (Stobbe, 5/2

CIDRAP: HHS, NIH Announce Universal Vaccine Platform, Promote Placebo Trials For New Vaccines
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the National Institutes of Health  (NIH) today announced a next-generation, universal vaccine platform called Generation Gold Standard, using a beta-propiolactone (BPL)-inactivated, whole-virus platform. “Generation Gold Standard is a paradigm shift,” said NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, MD, in a press release. “It extends vaccine protection beyond strain-specific limits and prepares for flu viral threats – not just today’s, but tomorrow’s as well – using traditional vaccine technology brought into the 21st century.” (Soucheray, 5/2)

Capitol Weekly: Capitol Spotlight: Sen. Scott Wiener
Nobody can ever accuse Sen. Scott Wiener of only taking on the easy fights. The San Francisco Democrat has in fact developed a reputation as someone almost allergic to tackling any bill – from housing to health care, from psychedelics to artificial intelligence – that doesn’t promise a bare-knuckles brawl to get passed. Just don’t tell him that.“I do smaller bills, too,” he says. “I actually do a whole range of bills that are very impactful.” (Ehisen, 5/4)