Santa Cruz County Health Articles

California voters narrowly passed Proposition 1, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s measure to fund mental health housing. He’s prodding counties to use the money quickly.

Information provided by San Benito County. Lea este articulo en español aqui.

A local group is calling on the nation’s largest berry grower to cease the use of pesticides on farm fields located near schools.

How the California mental health crisis emerged out of the state’s history of deinstitutionalization and laws designed to protect the mentally ill, as well as the communities around them.

Santa Cruz has a powerful activist history, and one of the most impressive outcomes for our county emerged from the Women’s Health Collective of the early 70’s.
Monday, on the Talk of the Bay, two of the collective’s founding mother’s–Coleen …

Partly due to global warming and the proliferation of ticks, Lyme disease is the fastest growing infectious disease in the US. Here’s how to protect yourself.

After 133 people died in Santa Cruz County in 2023 after overdosing on Fentanyl, the Sheriff’s Office has launched a new way to address the problem, with a special focus on the people who deal the dangerous drug.

Farmworkers pick strawberries near Watsonville in August 2020. (David Rodriguez — The Salinas Californian file)
Key takeaways

The Pajaro Valley Health Care District (PVHCD) on Wednesday appointed former Watsonville City Manager Marcela Tavantzis to fill the seat left vacant when John Friel resigned on March 19.

After months of work promoting Measure N—efforts that included going door to door in the vast Pajaro Valley Health Care District (PVHCD)—officials can now begin to envision how they will use the $116 million to improve Watsonville Community Hospital.

The UCSC Campus Mobile Crisis Team is the first of its kind on a University of California campus. The CMCT provides an empathetic, non-police response to emergency calls regarding mental health crises on campus. Following a series of police killings …

It’s been a nail-biter of a week for supporters of Measure N, the $116 million Watsonville Community Hospital bond, as the measure as been hovering about 2 percentage points above its required target.

Watsonville’s Measure N is holding steady at 68.5% of the vote, just over the 66.6% majority needed to pass.

“Intelligent” speed-limiting technology will be required in all new California cars starting in 2027, if a new law authored by San Francisco Senator Scott Wiener passes.

With traffic deaths now regularly topping 300 per year, Measure HLA on the March 5 ballot gives Los Angeles voters the opportunity to force their reluctant city to implement new traffic safety measures.

As the COVID pandemic eased, so did the epidemic of death on the road. Somewhat. But the ongoing crisis of traffic fatalities remains at high levels with early numbers form 2023 appearing to top 4,000 in California.

State lawmakers reconvene with a lot of problems to fix, but not a lot of money to spend on solutions with a projected $68 billion budget deficit.

Watsonville Community Hospital. Pajaronian file photo
Just two years ago, Watsonville Community Hospital was saddled with a $30 million debt and was facing bankruptcy and possible closure.

Undocumented Californians are leaving health care clinics with “smiles” after they learn they’re newly eligible for Medi-Cal insurance. The health insurance expansion was decades in the making for immigrant advocates.