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Sequoia Healthcare District Gives $4.5M to Schools |
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June 16, 2010
Reacting to the tremendous cuts in education budgets Sequoia Healthcare District in Redwood City has granted $4.5 million to four of its local school districts.
“The schools in our area have been hit really hard and have had to lay off a lot of people who fall into the area of school health,” said Lee Michelson, CEO of the Sequoia Healthcare District. “We had some additional money and thought this would be a great way for the District to help,” he said.
Sequoia has granted $1.5 million annually for three years and has formed a cooperative arrangement called the Healthy Schools Initiative, with four San Mateo County school districts.
The money will help hire back a minimal number of school nurses, licensed vocational nurses, wellness coordinators, health educators, physical education instructors and counselors. And the benefits will be spread over 34 schools covering all age levels, kindergarten trough 12th grade.
“At our board meeting tonight we’re going to cut $7.8 million from our budget over last year, while at the same time we’re educating 1,000 more students,” said Dennis McBride, President of the Redwood City School District Board of Trustees, in a meeting with Sequoia. “To come here and hear you say you’re going to give us money makes me speechless.” he said.
Michelson explained that Sequoia paid off a large financial obligation last year and now has more money available.
“We’re not the kind to sit on it when there are needs out there,” he said. He added that Sequoia is funded primarily through tax dollars and that the District will appoint a staff member to coordinate the grants to see that they are well spent and are having an impact.
The school districts benefitting from the grants include the San Carlos School District, the Belmont-Redwood Shores School District, the Redwood City School District and the Sequoia High School District.
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Santa Clara County Medical Association Awards |
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June 15, 2010
The Santa Clara County Medical Association (SCCMA) honored six people at its Awards Banquet at The Fairmont San Jose last week.
Judge Lawrence Terry received the Citizen’s Award for his outstanding service involving the rehabilitation of drug addicts. In 1994 he established the first Drug Treatment Court for the Santa Clara County Superior Court. It now handles more than 7,000 cases annually and has six full-time judges.
The Outstanding Contribution in Community Service award went to Leo Strutner, MD He is a member of the Order of Malta, a service organization, and of the Serra Club of Santa Clara, which generates religious vocations. He has fed the poor at Martha’s Kitchen twice a week for 10 years and is a spiritual minister for nursing homes. He has helped grow that ministry to 80 volunteers from 16 parishes serving 26 skilled nursing facilities in Santa Clara County.
James Hinsdale, MD received the Outstanding Contribution to the Medical Association Award for his work as President-Elect of CMA this year, AMA Trustee and past president of SCCMA.
David Levin MD received the Outstanding Contribution in Medical Education Award for creating an OB/GYN residency program that has been given five-year accreditation’s twice, which happens very rarely across the country.
Gary Steinberg, MD took home the Outstanding Achievement in Medicine Award for his founding of the Stanford Stroke Center in 1991, where he is now Co-Director. He was appointed Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford in 1995 and in October 2008 he was appointed Director of the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences. He recently received a $20 million grant from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine to study neural stem cells for treating motor deficits due to stroke and to convert that research into a Phase I clinical trial.
Melvin Britton, MD received the Benjamin J. Cory Award for his pioneering and forward-looking ideas. He has served at the Palo Alto Medical Clinic for many years as well as at the Medical Association. For 20 years he was a delegate and alternate delegate to the American Medical Association for the American College of Rheumatology. He has served as chairman of the board for the Institute for Medial Quality and has been a surveyor in the hospital program, the HMO survey group, and ambulatory survey group for more than 35 years.
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 15 June 2010 15:49 |
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Blue Shield Foundation Gives $6M to Health and Business Nonprofits in Q2 |
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June 9, 2010
In it’s Second Quarter Blue Shield of California Foundation allocated $6 million in grants to philanthropic organizations, with more than half of the money going to domestic violence services.
During the next two years $3.2 million of the grant money will be used to help fund the operating costs of domestic violence shelters and service providers.
“Domestic violence shelters are a lifeline for California families,” said Bess Bendet, director of Blue Shield Against Violence. “With a sharp increase in the number of families seeking help and so much uncertainty around funding for shelters, our core support is needed now more than ever.” She said.
The next largest piece of the grant money, $1.9 million, will go to the Clinic Leadership Institute (CLI). This is a program through the Center for the Health Professions at the University of California, San Francisco. The second class will graduate this June.
The foundation is also granting $330,000 to the Nonprofit Finance Fund, which will provide financial consulting to shelters. And $30,000 will go to Marin Abused Women’s Services to help faith-based organizations deal with domestic violence in their communities.
In addition $400,000 will go to the Small Business Majority, a group founded by small business owners to present unbiased information on issues that affect small businesses.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 09 June 2010 13:08 |
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Former Intel Chairman Funds UC Medical Program |
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June 4, 2010
Andy Grove, former Chairman of the board at Intel Corp., has donated $1.5 million to create the first of its kind translational medicine program at two University of California campuses in San Francisco and Berkeley.
The plan is to form a master’s program focused on expediting the development of new therapies for serious diseases from laboratory bench to patient bedside. It will draw students from engineering, bioengineering, business, medicine, research and industry. Grove presented his idea at a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) conference in 2009.
“What we have learned from decades of rapid development of information technology is that the key is relentless focus on ‘better, faster, cheaper’ – in everything,” Grove said in a press release. “The best results are achieved through the cooperative efforts of different disciplines, all aimed at the same objective,” he said.
Despite the fact that inflation-adjusted research spending has doubled from 1995 to 2005, the rate of new drug approvals has not increased, said S. Claiborne Johnston, MD an associate vice chancellor of research at UCSF, in a press release. He is also the director of the UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Johnston hopes the program will satisfy an important need.
“Clinicians generally don’t have the skills to be good inventors and engineers often don’t understand the clinical problems. Our program is trying to provide pivotal training to both groups,” he said.
The program will launch this fall through the existing master’s program in the UCSF-UC Berkeley Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering. It will accommodate 12 students to start and is expected to grow to 50 students annually over the next six years.
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