Covering Homeless Medical Respite Care: Ideas From Journalist Isabelle Walker
A great health story out of San Jose, Calif. caught my eye today – in part because of its hidden topic and in part because I read it not in a San Jose media outlet but in Isabelle Walker's Homeless in Santa Barbara blog.
Walker recently participated in the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships' Online Community Building and Health program for bloggers and online news editors. She also reports on health issues for the Santa Barbara Independent. I hope to hear from her soon on how she heard about the Santa Clara County Medical Respite Center in San Jose and will update this post when I do.
She writes that the 15-bed respite center, funded by area hospitals, serves homeless people who might otherwise return to the streets when they're discharged from the hospital emergency rooms or inpatient units:
The respite center is situated in wing of a sprawling San Jose homeless shelter called EHC Life Builders. Though close to the big shelter, the center is distinctly separated, along a long wide corridor that's breezy and clean with linoleum floors and sofas for socializing and reading. Along the corridor are seven bedrooms. The program is basically "Pay to Play." For their money, each of the nine hospitals gets to refer homeless patients to the center---as long as they're able to do three things: walk to the bathroom, walk to the cafeteria for meals, and take their own medication. The hospitals end up avoiding expensive, unnecessary bed-days in which homeless people linger around because they have no place to go. They also get to avoid readmissions for conditions that didn't heal, which in some cases could result in a fine from Medicare.
Walker smartly focuses on the estimated cost savings from the program, noting that the center spared the sponsoring hospitals 783 days of housing the uninsured homeless patients – which "works out to be roughly a million dollars in savings in the program's first two years," she writes.
Other cities with homeless medical respite programs include Boston, Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Seattle.
If you're interested in covering homeless medical respite issues in your own community – issues potentially as important to taxpayers as they are to local hospitals and their homeless patients, here are some resources:
Respite Care Providers' Network: A program of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, this organization also publishes Respite News, a quarterly newsletter.
Medical Respite Care And Homelessness: 2011 policy statement from the National Health Care for the Homeless Council
Doc Gurley's Urban Health Beat: A San Francisco public health doctor's blog on homeless medical and social issues.