New state bill seeks to reduce wait times for mental health follow-up visits
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State Sen. Scott Wiener has introduced legislation to require health insurance providers to help accelerate the delivery of mental health care services.Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle 2020
State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, introduced legislation this week that would require health insurance providers to help accelerate the delivery of mental health care services that advocates say are desperately needed to confront a growing crisis fueled by the coronavirus pandemic.
The bill, SB221, would cut down on wait times for patients seeking care for mental health and substance use issues, requiring health plans and insurers to provide timely follow-up appointments. Wiener said the legislation is meant to ensure that mental health is treated with the same urgency as other medical issues.
The nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, declared on March 6 by filing the official paperwork that they were ready to vote on the prospect of joining a national union. At the time, they were motivated by the desire for more nurses and support staff, and to have a voice in hospital decisions.
For Health Care Workers, The Pandemic Is Fueling Renewed Interest In Unions – Nation & World News wuft.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wuft.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Nurses at Albany Medical Center picketed on Dec.1, asking for more personal protective equipment. They say they re having to reuse N95 masks up to 20 times.
In September, after six months of exhausting work battling the pandemic, nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville, N.C., voted to unionize. The vote passed with 70%, a high margin of victory in a historically anti-union state, according to academic experts who study labor movements.
The nurses had originally filed paperwork to hold this vote in March but were forced to delay it when the pandemic began heating up. And the issues that had driven them toward unionizing were only heightened by the crisis. It raised new, urgent problems too, including struggles to get enough PPE, and inconsistent testing and notification of exposures to COVID-positive patients.
Tuesday, Jan. 5. Here’s what’s happening with the coronavirus in California and beyond.
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Firefighters in Los Angeles have been serving on the front lines of the pandemic, and they’re regularly exposed to the coronavirus especially those who work as paramedics and emergency medical technicians. More than 670 city firefighters have tested positive for infections so far, a dozen have been hospitalized and two have died. So it makes sense that firefighters were the first city workers to get access to the COVID-19 vaccine.