Bakersfield campaign places women’s cardiovascular risk at center stage
Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death for women, yet fewer than half recognize the risk. In Kern County, the American Heart Association is using its Go Red for Women movement to confront that gap with a local campaign built around awareness, access, and earlier action.
The effort is being led locally by Deanna Blaise, senior vice president at Valley Strong Credit Union, who serves as Kern County chair. She is working with a volunteer executive leadership team drawn from healthcare, education, behavioral health, hospice, fitness, and community organizations. The roster includes Terri Agcaoili of California Cardiovascular Institute, Valery Diaz of Dignity Health, Emily Duran of Kern Family Health Care, Cornelio Gutierrez Lozano of Bakersfield Behavioral Healthcare Hospital, Beth Hoffmann of Hoffmann Hospice, NaTesha Johnson of Bakersfield College, Dr. Olga Meave of Clinica Sierra Vista, Justin Thompson of Centre for Neuro Skills, Kristi Windtberg of LVL Fitness, and Angela Barton of Barton Marketing.
The structure of the campaign reflects a simple clinical truth: women’s heart health is not a niche issue. It is a population-level problem shaped by delayed recognition, uneven access to care, and a long history of underestimation in both public education and clinical outreach. When women do not view cardiovascular disease as a personal threat, preventive care is more likely to slip behind work, caregiving, and family obligations.
Blaise described the effort as personal, pointing to her family history of heart disease. Her remarks capture an issue clinicians see often in preventive cardiology: women frequently defer their own screening, blood pressure checks, lipid evaluation, and symptom assessment until disease is already established. In practical terms, that delay can mean missed opportunities to treat risk factors before they harden into coronary, cerebrovascular, or heart failure events.
The campaign is not limited to awareness alone. It is also positioned as a response to persistent gaps in research, education, and care. Those gaps matter because cardiovascular disease in women does not present as an abstract statistic. It shows up in emergency departments, primary care offices, and specialty clinics as chest pain that is minimized, hypertension that goes untreated, and risk profiles that are not fully explained to patients who need to hear them early.
Local leadership is turning awareness into public health action
National Wear Red Day on Friday, February 5, 2027 will serve as one of the campaign’s main visibility moments. Companies, community leaders, and survivors are being asked to wear red in support of women’s heart and brain health. A local luncheon is scheduled for February 19, 2027 at Stockdale Country Club, where supporters will be invited to celebrate local achievements and donate funds to support the movement.
The event calendar matters because cardiovascular prevention depends on repetition, visibility, and community reinforcement. A single message rarely changes behavior; a sustained campaign can. Public health outreach works best when it is carried by trusted local leaders who can translate broad epidemiology into neighborhood-specific action, whether that means encouraging screening, reinforcing healthy lifestyle habits, or making the case for earlier medical evaluation when symptoms appear.
Blaise framed the message in terms that resonate well beyond philanthropy. When women prioritize their own health, they are more likely to remain active caregivers, leaders, and contributors in their communities. That is not a slogan. It is the downstream effect of preventing myocardial infarction, stroke, heart failure, and other major cardiovascular complications that can disrupt families and workplaces for years.
For Kern County, the mix of participants also matters. A coalition that includes clinical institutions, health plans, educational organizations, fitness leaders, and behavioral health providers is better suited to address the social and medical factors that shape cardiovascular risk. Heart disease prevention rarely depends on one intervention alone. It requires blood pressure control, diet and activity counseling, access to routine care, stress management, tobacco cessation support, and enough health literacy for people to understand when symptoms should prompt urgent evaluation.
Why women’s heart health still needs a louder message
The American Heart Association points to decades of work through Go Red for Women, a signature initiative designed to improve awareness and encourage women to know their risk. The movement is built around a hard reality: although many cardiac events can be prevented, cardiovascular disease still claims the lives of 1 in 3 women. Even with that burden, awareness remains uneven, and the consequences are visible in the pattern of delayed diagnosis and missed prevention opportunities.
From a clinical standpoint, the problem is not only recognition but also action. A woman may know heart disease exists and still underestimate her own vulnerability if she has no dramatic symptoms, no prior event, or no family history she understands as meaningful. By the time warning signs become hard to ignore, the disease process may already involve unstable plaque, vascular injury, or progressive cardiac dysfunction.
That is why localized campaigns retain value even in an era of advanced therapeutics and high-level guidelines. Prevention still depends on whether people show up for care, ask about risk, and have access to clinicians who will measure it, explain it, and treat it consistently. The Kern County effort is aimed at closing exactly those gaps, one conversation and one public event at a time.
Nationally, Go Red for Women is sponsored by CVS Health, and the Kern County luncheon is locally sponsored by Dignity Health. The organization is directing interested participants to GoRedforWomen.org for more information and to heart.org/KernCountyGoRed for luncheon reservations.
The message emerging from Kern County is direct and clinically grounded: women cannot afford to treat cardiovascular prevention as optional. The remaining challenge is not whether the disease burden is real. It is whether awareness campaigns can keep turning that reality into earlier screening, better access, and fewer preventable events in the women most likely to shoulder the burden silently.