It looks like they did a pretty good job. The number of registered nurses nationwide skyrocketed in the past decade, according to a study released in today’s Health Affairs. Recent grads aged 23-26 increased by 62 percent. There hasn’t been a spike in nursing grads like this in the U.S. since the 1970s.

And it’s no different in California. Nursing school enrollments have doubled in the past decade, says Joanne Spetz, a nursing professor at UCSF and co-author of a UCSF report looking at California’s nursing forecast. The report shows that in the past five years, the number of California nursing graduates has doubled. Spetz says that’s because California also made huge efforts to recruit nursing students, like implementing accelerated degree programs.

Read the rest on KQED’s State of Health blog.

California mandates health insurance companies provide equal care for mental and physical health problems. But mental health services are often inadequate–or they don’t exist at all, says lead author David Grant.

One reason is when hospitals want to cut costs, mental health care is often the first to go. Grant notes that, just this morning, LA’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center announced it is cutting most of its psychiatric services.

“It’s a disaster,” Grant said about Cedars-Sinai’s closing. “Health care is undergoing so much change and it’s under so much financial stress right now. Providers are really looking for ways to reduce health care costs.”

Read the rest on KQED’s State of Health blog.

(Lauri Rantala/Flickr)

This video of UC Davis campus police dousing protesters with pepper spray has close to two million views on YouTube and counting. UC Davis student David Busco was one of the students sprayed that day, saying the pain felt like “thousands of pieces of glass shooting into your eyes.”

Busco says the pepper spray was all over his face and mouth, meaning he could not avoid inhaling it, unless he stopped breathing. Concerned students poured bottled water over him, but this only worsened the problem by further spreading the pepper spray around his face and body. Busco says friends soon carried him to the nearest house and, after a quick Google search about pepper spray removal, washed him with dishwasher soap in the shower.

Pepper spray is legal for use in most states by anyone over age eighteen who is not a convicted felon. It is frequently being used during Occupy protests nationwide. We’re told it hurts (it look likes it hurts), but what exactly are the health effects? And what’s the best way to treat it?

Read the rest on KQED’s State of Health blog or KQED’s News Fix blog.

Some individual counties saw drops in obesity levels while others, like Del Norte County, saw massive increases. The report, aptly named “A Patchwork of Progress,” reflects on these discrepancies. The Bay Area itself is somewhat of a patchwork, too. In nearly all Bay counties, childhood obesity rates are on the rise. The single exception was San Mateo county, which saw 5.6 percent decrease.

Read the rest on KQED’s State of health blog.