UCSF looks to build health-care consortium

As ValleyCare board continues to seek an affiliation with a health care partner, consider the comments of Sam Hawgood, the interim chancellor of the University of California San Francisco.

Hawgood, in an interview with the San Francisco Business Times published on April 25, was asked about what would change at UCSF.

His answer: “A key one is moving from an academic medical center—a singular place—to a much broader, more regional Greater Bay Area consortium of partnerships with community providers. Whether that’s hospitals, specialty hospitals, IPAs (independent practice associations—of physicians) or insurance companies with a range of different arrangements, it’s a consortium that can be a true health system. We are well on our way to doing that with Children’s Oakland, but we have lots of other conversations toward doing that.”

UCSF already has a partnership with ValleyCare to provide specialty pediatric services as well as access to cancer specialists through the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Some health care systems—Sutter, for instance—are much further down the road and, of course, Kaiser Permanente already is the integrated system that seems best suited to deal with the chaos being wrought by ObamaCare.

Dropping off some broken printers at Pleasanton’s free recycling day earlier this month, I encountered an earnest city employee given the job of engaging residents about reducing the runoff rain water from urban areas (wouldn’t more rain water be a welcome issue).
For many years, cities have installed labels on storm drains letting people know that the run-off eventually ends up in San Francisco Bay (the Arroyo de la Laguna drains the Livermore Valley’s 400-square-mile watershed and dumps into Niles Canyon).

That was news for folks used to dumping their used motor oil down the storm drain—but that was before cars got some complicated and people so unfamiliar with working on their vehicles—I confess, I still change my own oil on my 30-year-old diesel, but it’s way too challenging on my much younger Toyota pick-up.

During the recycling day, the city employee was doing his part by passing out a brochure about urban runoff. It included a packet of wild flowers. We chuckled about flowers given the drought and the need to significantly cut back on using water. Read the directions carefully and save them for the fall –they are native plants that should do well in the valley assuming winter rains return.