San Joaquin General Hospital has been under a slow transformation over the past few years, and this year will be the time for significant developments set in motion when the transformation started.
But all this is not happening in a vacuum. The county hospital is just one piece of the network of health care in San Joaquin County. The local impact of national health-care reform is still being determined. But there will be tens of thousands of poor and low-income county residents without health insurance who could find themselves insured.
And there are changes unique to San Joaquin County, starting with the opening of a prison hospital later this year to plans to build new medical facilities for veterans. Record health care reporter Joe Goldeen provides a snapshot of the changes in the local health-care industry in this story that ran over the weekend.
