Latest California Healthline Stories
Will Assembly Bill Help or Hurt Physical Therapists?
Paul Gaspar is pretty upset.
A physical therapist in the San Diego area and a board member of the California Physical Therapists Association, Gaspar said a bill recently introduced in the Assembly threatens the livelihood of many physical therapists in California.
He said it would promote over-utilization of physical therapy, increase costs and lower quality of care.
Will S.F. Paid Sick Leave Ordinance Spread to Rest of State?
A bill by Assembly member Fiona Ma proposes a statewide version of San Francisco’s city ordinance requiring employers to provide paid sick leave for workers. A new report says the San Francisco ordinance is keeping people healthier and costs down.
States Hurting, But Outlook Still Bright
Economist James Glassman knew it sounded funny. While he was speaking at the annual Health Care Forecast Conference at UC Irvine last week, the California Legislature was in the process of cutting another $12 billion out of its budget — half of that from health-related programs.
But the current bad news in health care and gloomy economic prognostications will not continue, he said.
“In my mind,” Glassman said, “you have to balance what you’re hearing with what’s happening in the market. If it really was so dire, for instance, the bond market would be a disaster.”
How Hospital Transformed Care Model in Tough Economy
Despite low funding and high demand, some public hospitals are not only surviving, but thriving. One county hospital says its success lies in reshaping itself and its image using principles embodied in its Innovative Care Center.
Biomedical Jobs No. 1 in San Diego Health Care Work Force
The recession has brought mixed results for the various sectors of San Diego’s health care labor market. The biomedical industry saw job gains in 2009, while hospitals consolidated or froze jobs. Although nursing graduates are struggling to find work in the region now, hospital officials predict future shortages of nurses and allied health professionals.
Public-Private Partnerships Help Train Health Care Work Force
Partnerships between schools and health care providers in California are helping to train the next generation of health care workers in tight economic times.
Pan Named Chair of Health Care Work Force Committee
Richard Pan, a pediatrician newly elected to the Assembly from Natomas (near Sacramento), was named this week to chair the Assembly select committee on health care work force and access to care. It’s a subject the Democrat knows well, since he worked as the director of the pediatric residency program at UC Davis before winning his Assembly seat in November.
The dearth in physicians and other providers in the state is felt particularly strongly in rural and underserved urban areas, he said. The first step to fixing that, he said, may be to have more training and development of health professionals.
“What we want to try to look at is to find effective ways to deal with geographic maldistribution of providers, and to find and leverage funding to enable people to enter health professions,” Pan said.
For-Profit Colleges’ Health Care Training Examined
A new study suggests that for-profit universities produce too few graduates in the most needed health care professions, such as nursing and diagnostic technology, and too many in the support occupations, such as medical assistants and massage therapists.
Hope Raised by Patient-Centered Medical Home
Robert Reid thinks he has seen the future, and it comes from Washington.
Not D.C. — the state of Washington.
That’s where Reid of Seattle’s Group Health Research Institute has seen the patient-centered medical home in action, and that’s what he was preaching to medical leaders in Sacramento yesterday.
Job Growth in California’s Health Care Sector Slowing to a Crawl Amid Ongoing Recession
Deloras Jones of the California Institute for Nursing and Healthcare, Dylan Roby of the UCLA School of Public Health and Neeraj Sood of the University of Southern California spoke with California Healthline about health care job growth.