A public forum especially for community health professionals, policymakers, academics, and community members working with or concerned with health care issues will be held on Saturday, March 3 from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. in the Cooperage.
Speakers at "What Can We do Locally: Health Care Crisis in Sonoma County" will present and discuss final study findings on overall local coalition-building around critical health care needs, on what might be learned from four other progressive counties at work on community-building around access to healthcare, and on developing an improved community health care data analysis and communication system.
Also in the early afternoon, Dr. Phyllis Senter, President of the Sonoma County Medical Association, and George Perez, CEO of Memorial-St. Joseph's, will speak.
Julie Kawahara, of Kawahara and Associates, opens the conference with "Improving Access to Health Care: Sonoma County's Response".
Annette Gardner, an Academic Specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, Institute for Health Care Policy Studies, speaks on "Increasing Access to Care for California's Medically Underserved: Four County Models - Implications for Sonoma County," about community coalition-building and health care access.
This presentation will include a panel, represented by the central coalition leaders from each of Fresno, Santa Cruz, Solano, and Humboldt counties.
Gil Ojeda, Director of the California Program on Access to Care at the University of California Office of the President, discusses critical local health care data patterns, innovations, and how they can be brought together to better inform public health care providers, policy makers, and the public. He will also give an overview of the morning's presentations and of the SSU program.
These latest studies have been supported by The California Endowment, the California Program on Access to Care, University of California Office of the President, the SSU President's Office, the Northern California Labor Council, the Integrative Medical Clinic of Santa Rosa, and the SSU local Health Care Crisis Initiative.
This event is the culminating event sponsored by the SSU Community-Campus Initiative on the Sonoma County Health Care Crisis and the California Program on Access to Care, California Policy Research Center, University of California Office of the President. It completes the SSU Initiative's five-year service to the community and campus.
Those who wish to attend are requested to RSVP via e-mail to skip.robinson@sonoma.edu. Within the body of the e-mail message include a name, relationship to healthcare work, mailing address, and contact phone number.
For more information on the conference, contact Skip Robinson at the e-mail address above. For information on the conference and broader background of local thinking on this crisis, visit the Initiative website atwww.sonoma.edu/programs/healthcrisis. A live video stream of the conference will be made available from the site. After the event, the video stream will be saved as an archive recording of the conference.
