State of Our Children

Our mission guides us daily to provide high-quality, comprehensive healthcare services to children, regardless of their ability to pay, and to continuously improve the health and well-being of children.

For adults and children alike, health is influenced by both the clinical care we have access to as well as from the conditions in which we live away from the hospital or doctor’s office. National research consistently indicates that 20% of our health is directly correlated to clinical settings and 80% from the social conditions in which we live.

This annual list of community health needs facing our kids doesn’t change much from year to year. All of these issues are challenging, nearly all are generational, and every one of them requires intention, partnerships and a long-term commitment. These issues do not exist in their own silos, but rather are interconnected and interdependent. With our community partners, we continue to understand and equitably address these issues and measure our progress.

As we continue our collective work, the realities of growing up in California’s Central Valley are present in the lives of the children we are privileged to serve.

According to the Healthy Places Index, most Central Valley ZIP codes are in the lowest performing quartiles (when compared with other California neighborhoods) for the following conditions: economic, education, social, transportation, clean environment, healthcare access and neighborhood quality.

The Central Valley is often described as a region of contradictions.

• In a state with the highest per capita income, seven of the 10 California counties with the lowest per capita income are in our hospital service area.
• Six of California’s counties with the highest number of patients enrolled in Medi-Cal are in our service area.
• In a region with three national parks and communities with robust trail systems, nearly 50% of our fifth graders are obese and suffer from asthma and diabetes at a higher rate than the state average.
• The San Joaquin Valley is the “nation’s breadbasket,” yet more than one out of five children are hungry each day.
• Of California’s Environmental Protection Agency’s designation of 30 “disadvantaged” communities across the state — places with higher-than-normal environmental challenges — 23 of those communities are within eight counties in our service area.

The Guilds Center for Community Health was launched in 2019 to align our organization’s community work, to build new clinical-to-community bridges around key health issues and to embark on new initiatives to help fill the gaps that may exist across our region and continue to make a difference in the lives of our kids.

We worked with leaders from nine Valley counties to establish the first safe-sleep coalition to end infant mortality due to unsafe sleeping conditions. In partnership with the Central California Food Bank, we launched a healthy food home-delivery program to provided added food resources to our families in our most rural communities who are dealing with medically complex children at home. And we shepherded a first-of-its-kind educational book about what it is like to live with epilepsy — written by kids for kids.

Visit the Guilds Center website to learn more about our programs and partnerships.