News Report, Malcolm Marshall
Richmond High School senior Maribel Navarro remembers what it felt like to have to go to the emergency room every time she had an asthma attack, which was often. “When I was little, I’d get my asthma really bad. I would go to the hospital in the middle of the night. It (was) hard to try to calm down… you don’t know how to react,” she recalls.
Navarro, 17, who has lived in Richmond her entire life, remembers thinking to herself, “I can’t breathe, what else can I do?”
Asthma attacks like the one Navarro describes send tens of thousands of children in California to the emergency room every year. But in Richmond, a city with a particularly high prevalence of asthma, residents will soon have another option. A new asthma treatment clinic, the first in Contra Costa County, is slated to open in September at the West County Health Center in neighboring San Pablo.
The new clinic aims to reduce the number of asthma patients using emergency rooms, by helping to develop consistent management plans and a more preventative approach, with an emphasis on self-management.
Read more at the Richmond Pulse
