Health
The health reform bill the House of Representatives approved last month prints out at 2,014 pages, Oakland North asked a health policy expert to haul the whole pile to her office recently and examine it to see what practical impact its provisions might have on four local residents who face different health insurance situations.
Alessanda Chesley has a job she loves, but lost her employer-provided health insurance in August. If she lived in San Francisco, she’d be eligible for Healthy San Francisco, the city’s health care program for the uninsured. But she lives in Oakland.
During the past two months, three Oakland North reporters have interviewed five teens at Castlemont High School on MacArthur Boulevard in East Oakland. This neighborhood is at center of some of the city’s worst violence, and it’s a violence that does not spare young people. During the last three years, one in every two homicide victims in Oakland has been between the ages of 12 and 24. Even amid this tragedy, the five teens that met with Oakland North have,…
Nurses usually have no trouble finding work. But nearly 40 percent of the graduating class of 2009 are without hospital jobs due to the recent economic downturn. We follow one recent nursing graduate from North Oakland’s Samuel Merritt College who is looking for work.
A container of pasta. A 10-pound tube of ground turkey. A can of tomato sauce. It was a Monday in November at a central kitchen in East Oakland and dozens of cardboard boxes were being unloaded, revealing the three main ingredients for a pasta and meat-sauce dish that would be served to elementary school kids in the Oakland Unified School District that Thursday. In a matter of hours, stainless steel racks filled with clumps of pasta, each in open-faced cardboard…
The lunchroom at Hoover Elementary School has a long metal counter built into the wall between the lunchroom and the kitchen. There’s an industrial-looking sliding metal door that can be opened for serving food directly from the kitchen, but this serving arrangement is no longer used. In terms of food preparation devices, the kitchen now boasts only a refrigerator and an “oven” that is not equipped to do anything old-fashioned, like bake; it only reheats trays of already-cooked meals. Despite the fact that there is no cooking at Hoover, there are still 325 mouths to feed at breakfast and lunch every day.
As health organizers around the globe assess the illness during the week of World AIDS Day, local officials say funding cuts and young people’s attitudes are contributing to new infections and the comparatively higher rates of HIV/AIDS among black teens and women.
The Hooligans MC Christmas Toy Run had their 5th annual toy drive this afternoon in a parking lot on 51st Street and Telelgraph Avenue. The motorcycle group from Modesto comes to Oakland every year for the day to collect gifts and cash donations to make sure every patient at Children’s Hospital in Oakland has a gift for the holidays. In addition to the main event of the day—collecting toys—there was a well-attended barbecue and motorcycle enthusiasts from all over California…
The Oakland Raiders and Mrs. Fields Cookies helped the Oakland Children’s Hospital celebrate its 50-year anniversary Tuesday morning. Raiders players paid a visit to the hospital’s atrium, where patients and staff were treated to cookies and snuggly, eye-patch-wearing teddy bears.