Bioethicist and writer Carl Elliott used many documents to piece together the story of how a research team desperate for patients helped create a pipeline for clinical trial participants by setting up a psychiatric ward. Here's how he did it.
In one year, 477 people in San Francisco, most of them homeless, used $20 million worth of urgent/emergency services — an average of $42,067 each — and taxpayers paid the bill. Knowing who they are is the first step towards treating their illnesses, injuries, and addictions.
Homeless people who are discharged from acute care hospital to a step-down care center, or medical respite bed, are less likely to be readmitted in 90-days, according to an October, 2009 study in The Journal of Prevention and Intervention in The Community.
In California’s largest cities, one senses that the number of homeless people continues to grow, whatever the interventions to prevent it. But some of the more commonly cited reasons for that growth don't explain the whole story.
This is one in a series of articles, running between Thanksgiving and January, examining the relationship between housing loss and death in San Francisco. Check out the previous articles in the series, Looking for death, Gunpowder on the streets, and Will losing your home kill you?, Hidden in plain sight: dying and homelessness, and Be selfish: Give a gift to a homeless person and The Tenderloin: substance abuse and Nate, Starving in the Financial District: Ken and food insecurity, and The Sixth and Mission Death Corridor: Assaults, brain trauma and homicide.
If you're like me, you probably like to tell yourself that we don't actually need to read Oliver Twist to know that it's bad for children to grow up on the street. Especially since Dickens discreetly omitted the worst sexual predations that can happen to a child behind a dumpster. As a developed society, we're way beyond needing to revisit that lesson, right?
Health care, education, politics, and pride take a back seat when you have no shelter.
This is one in a series of articles examining the relationship between housing loss and death in San Francisco. Check out the previous articles in the series, Looking for death,Gunpowder on the streets, and Will losing your home kill you?
Victoria Colliver explains that the effects of depression and mental illness have shown a high correlation to shortened life expectancy and links to high-risk health behaviors.
When work and life collide: Reporting on an emotionally-charged story at an emotionally-charged time
One of the happiest moments of 2009 for me personally was when I found out I received a fellowship from the California Endowment to produce a video series on teen suicide.
