Ahead of what could be a busy wildfire season, Pierce and six other Puget Sound-area counties are promoting a regional evacuation alert system. The Ready, Set, Go program creates a standardized three-step evacuation messaging system for most counties bordering Puget Sound, including Pierce, Kitsap, King, Skagit, Thurston, Snohomish and Whatcom. Emergency Management officials are hoping
Across the West Sound, people experiencing a behavioral health crisis often end up in local hospitals. Every month, around 150 people in crisis arrive at the St. Michael Medical Center emergency room in Silverdale. Another 40 or 50 end up at St. Anthony Hospital in Gig Harbor. Hannah Shockley, program management planner for Kitsap County’s
Wildfire Ready Neighbors, a statewide initiative that helps property owners prepare their homes for wildfires, expanded to Gig Harbor last week. State Public Land Commissioner Hilary Franz unveiled the new program during a press conference at Fire Station 50 in Gig Harbor on May 31. Officials from the Washington Department of Natural Resources and Gig
As the leader of Kitsap Mental Health Services, CEO Monica Bernard knows as well as anyone how easy it can be for someone facing serious mental illness to dismiss any anticipation of recovery. “Maybe their lives are weighed down by poverty, or housing instability, or chronic illness. It’s all too easy for them to give
Since closing its labor and delivery unit two years ago, Naval Hospital Bremerton – which once delivered a quarter of Kitsap County’s babies – has relied on St. Michael’s Medical Center in Silverdale to provide delivery and obstetrics care to military patients. Kitsap Public Health officials say the reduction in obstetrics care is one of
Shea Smiley is the city’s Housing, Health and Human Services manager. Her position, created last year, helps aid those in need.
Walking through the rooms of Bremerton Foodline, executive director Cori Kauk describes her grand vision for the currently under-remodel food bank: A new, inviting floor space for shoppers, more accessible entry points, and redoing a shed out back. By comparison, her latest project seems quite small. It needs only a reusable shopping bag and a
As the largest 911 call center in Washington, a growing number of the nearly 1 million calls South Sound 911 handles annually involve someone experiencing a mental or behavioral health crisis. Aiming to better support these callers, the emergency call center launched a first-of-its-kind model that will bring counselors from the state’s 988 mental health
For decades, research into substance use treatment has found that a rigid focus on abstinence-only models has caused just a small fraction of those in need to seek treatment. But as the opioid epidemic surges in Kitsap and across the country, Wayne Swanson, director of Subacute Recovery Services at Kitsap Mental Health Services, says providers
