Program brings medical care workers directly to folks experiencing homelessness
Following the success its leaders have seen with the organization’s street medicine effort in Garden Grove, CalOptima Health is taking its “doctor’s office on wheels” program next to visit homeless communities in Anaheim and Costa Mesa.
The street medicine program delivers primary health care, as well as behavioral health services and case management help, to unhoused individuals living in parks, under freeways and elsewhere on the streets.
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When the program launched in Garden Grove in April, CalOptima gave Healthcare in Action – an organization that’s part of the SCAN Group and provides health care and other services to homeless individuals – the goal of signing up 200 patients in 18 months. Ten months later, the team has already reached 138 members receiving services.
The medical team – consisting of a physician assistant, registered nurse, a mental health specialist and peer navigators who have experience with homelessness themselves – travels the community in a van equipped with most things a traditional medical office would have and visits people who are homeless where they are at.
CalOptima is investing $5 million for a two-year expansion of the program into Anaheim and Costa Mesa. Visits there are expected to launch in August.
CalOptima is the provider of publicly funded health coverage in Orange County and, with support from the state, is investing more into addressing housing and homeless needs with its healthcare support services.
Kelly Bruno-Nelson, executive director of Medi-Cal/CalAIM at CalOptima, said piloting the program in one city was essential to making sure it was designed correctly.
“It’s a new model and it’s a new way of providing street medicine. We wanted to make sure it works,” Bruno-Nelson said. “We had some concepts and some ideas. We had some evidence-based practices at the foundation, harm reduction and trauma-informed care, all those things. But we wanted the time to design it, make sure it works before we really expanded into other cities.”
Bruno-Nelson said for her, the “ultimate success” of the program is that it can lead folks to housing.
“Just last week we were able to connect four of the members in Garden Grove to housing vouchers. So, four people that were living in encampments in Garden Grove are now out looking for apartments,” she said, adding that the peer navigators on the outreach team who build trust and rapport with the unhoused community make it possible.
The next step is to select a provider for Costa Mesa and Anaheim. From there, a steering committee for each city made up of local leaders, public safety agencies and local community organizations will meet to flesh out the specifics of the program and tailor it to each community’s needs.
“The other thing we’ve added, that was something we didn’t think of before and we should have, is that we’re going to have an individual with lived experience on each of those steering committees,” Bruno-Nelson said. “The voice of the unhoused was missing in that planning. So now with these two cities, we’ll have somebody with lived expertise at the table from the beginning.”
Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken said the street medicine program could be one more tool for Anaheim to get folks off the streets.
“It’s really important for me to meet people where they are. Asking someone who is injured or is suffering to get to a bus and go to a brick-and-mortar location isn’t always feasible,” Aitken said. “We’re hoping to move even more people off the street and into shelters, where we can connect them with a variety of services, not just medical care and housing.”
Unhoused folks deserve access to healthcare and other resources, Costa Mesa Mayor John Stephens said.
“I’d love it in a world where we could eliminate homelessness and keep everybody safe and dry in the city of Costa Mesa. That would be everybody’s goal. But in the meantime, people have health care issues,” Stephens said. “What you see a lot is people who are on the street have such difficulty finding health care and such difficulty recuperating when they do get sick. So bringing resources to them where they can address those issues is a wonderful thing.”
Bruno-Nelson said both cities have an extensive network of community organizations and supportive services and Aitken said the street medicine program will complement those already existing services.
“Anaheim’s strength is that we’re proactive. We don’t believe in waiting until a situation becomes a large-scale problem. We really believe in being compassionate and responsive, but also we’re not afraid to be innovative,” Aitken said. “If we see a program and believe in a program that we think can move the needle and get us closer to having a zero sum of unhoused individuals in our city, we’re not afraid to try new things.”
