Community
The care that happens outside the buildings
Free screenings, a mobile mammography unit, a teaching kitchen, and eleven parks' worth of summer wellness sessions. All free, all open to anyone, and none of them require you to be a Winterfield patient.
The programs
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Health in the Parks
One Saturday every September. Free checkups, vaccines, and vision tests in sixteen neighborhoods at once. 1,200 volunteers last year.
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Summer wellness series
Weekly sessions in eleven parks from June to August. Walking groups, chair exercise, and a monthly talk from a Winterfield clinician.
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Mobile mammography
A screening unit that parks where people already are: workplaces, churches, community centers, and grocery store lots.
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Teaching kitchen
Six-week cooking courses for people managing diabetes, high blood pressure, or kidney disease. Ingredients supplied, free.
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School nurse partnership
A Winterfield nurse in fourteen elementary schools one day a week, for vision, hearing, and immunization catch-up.
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Falls prevention
Home assessments and a strength class for anyone over 65, run out of six community centers.
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Nurse advice line
Free, 24 hours, staffed by registered nurses, and open to anyone in the county whether or not they are our patient.
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Medication take-back
Permanent drop boxes in the lobby of every hospital and clinic. No questions, no identification, nothing recorded.
Coming up
| Date | What | Where | Booking |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 8 | Summer wellness: chair exercise | Ardmore Park | Just turn up |
| Aug 15 | Mobile mammography | Ocean Vista community center | Book on (619) 555-0155 |
| Aug 22 | Teaching kitchen: cooking with diabetes, week 1 of 6 | Balboa Heights clinic | Book on (619) 555-0158 |
| Sep 12 | Health in the Parks | Sixteen sites countywide | Just turn up |
| Sep 19 | Falls prevention: strength and balance, week 1 of 8 | Eastgate community center | Book on (619) 555-0158 |
| Oct 3 | Flu vaccination drive | All sixteen Winterfield sites | Walk in |
Volunteering
About four hundred people volunteer with Winterfield in a normal year, and roughly triple that on Health in the Parks day. You do not need a clinical background for most of it.
- Event days. One Saturday, no commitment afterwards. Registration desks, wayfinding, translation, setup and teardown.
- Regular ward volunteering. Four hours a week for at least six months. Includes a background check and two days of training.
- Clinical volunteering. For licensed clinicians, at the free screening clinics. Credentialing takes about six weeks.
- Driving. Taking patients to and from appointments, mostly for dialysis and oncology. Mileage is reimbursed.
Email volunteer@winterfieldhealth.com or call (619) 555-0158. There is no application window; people start every month.
What this costs and why we do it
Winterfield spent $41.2 million on community benefit and uncompensated care in 2025. About a quarter of that is the programs on this page; the rest is care given to people who could not pay for it.
The honest reason is not only generosity. A county where fewer people have an untreated blood pressure problem is a county where fewer people arrive at our emergency department having a stroke. Screening in a grocery store parking lot is cheaper than a stroke, and better for the person, and those two facts point the same direction often enough to build a program on.
The full community benefit report is published every October and is available from the communications office.
Four hundred people give us their Saturdays
Most volunteering here needs no clinical background at all, and event days carry no commitment beyond the day itself.
Winterfield Health is a fictional organization built for software demonstrations. The programs, dates, figures, and telephone numbers on this page are invented.