Homeless folks will avoid seeking care until the last possible moment.
They have to be to the point where they can't get up and live their life,
they physically can't drag themselves around, they have a fever, they're hallucinating.
That is when they will finally submit to going to the emergency room.
A handful of our clients are very aggressive about their own wound care.
They'll clean their pocketknife and actually debride off dead tissue around wounds
to avoid having to go into the ER on their own.
Yeah, that's the level of sort of avoidance we're working
with where they're willing to do that.
[ Music ]
>> Want to give it a slam?
>> I think it's okay.
>> Just for Noam?
>> Yes, sir.
>> It's Monday morning.
We're getting caffeinated.
The van runs on caffeine without a doubt.
So we've got all our medical supplies loaded up.
They were all stocked yesterday.
We brought some of our food for our normal giveaways, such as socks,
warm blankets, jackets and the like.
[ Music ]
>> People on the street have a lot of walls.
They have a lot of walls.
We can never know until we engage and get to know them what their issue is,
but the main thing is to build a relationship with them because, you know,
homeless people need friends, they need somebody they can trust, they need somebody that's going
to show up when they say they're going to show up or when they can't show up at least get
in contact with them and let them know they still coming.
[ Music ]
>> I grew up, I was born and raised here.
I went to that school down the street, Avondale, you know, the neighborhood has changed a lot.
It used to be kind of affordable here.
Gentrification has hit it hard, you know.
It's kind of weird how I made like a big circle and came back to here, you know.
Well, my name is Dave.
I'm 57 years old.
I don't know what else you want to know.
I've got a little addiction problem.
That's part of the reason I'm out here.
I'm trying to battle it.
It's hard.
Worked all my life, you know, I've raised my family,
I've had houses, you know, I've had all of that.
It just seemed like I hit 50 and went [making sound].
I had some health problems, lost my job, had a couple of surgeries and, of course,
that got me hooked on painkillers and it just kind of drifted off into that, you know.
[ Music ]
The times I've been in the emergency room, you know, I had to go to the emergency room,
you know, and I try to be truthful and honest, you know, I mean they want to give me something
for pain and I've got to tell them, you know, hey, one Vicodin isn't going to do it.
I have a habit, you know, and it seems like that just flicks the switch
and they have a whole general outlook of what you're about,
you know, and you get judged a lot more.
I barely go to the doctor because of that, you know.
[ Traffic sounds ]
>> The type of care that we provide here it's just like a primary care clinic on wheels.
We deal with high blood pressure, we deal with hyperthyroidism and those kinds of things,
asthma, COPD, things that you deal with in a regular clinic except it's
in this setting, right, so it's a big difference.
Yeah, okay, [inaudible].
>> Yeah, it's infected, okay.
We'll get you that.
So, asthma care.
[ Music ]
I did primary care as a nurse practitioner for 5 years before getting to this job
and you have a clock, a stop watch in your mind and out here you need to unplug the clock.
When you're engaging someone about something completely non-medically related,
that's just as important in the job because it's going to create that relationship
to get them to that medical care.
There's the numbers we can easily talk about which are, you know,
the ER visits that we prevent by getting treatment to people.
When we get them in the primary care, the follow-up care that we do for folks
so they don't get back to the ER, those are very Western-friendly tangible things
that we can talk about and they're very important, but there's a lot more that goes
into it and a lot more advantages that we see every day.
[ Music ]
This is why most providers, nurses, social workers, doctors get into the field is to be
with people and help people and it's through our training and the realities of the system
that we have to pull back from that, but street medicine is exactly that.
You go to where they are and you meet them where they're at.
It's what, it's providing love and care like we wanted to when we were in school and that's,
we're lucky enough to be able to do that daily.
[ Music ]