Mission, Objectives and Mobile Services In our effort to address the barriers to healthcare access, our mission is to improve our clients well-being and health outcomes by providing medical, mental, and preventive services for individuals with a history of chronic homelessness. With a collaborative effort aided by the case management and outreach currently offered by the Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC), the mobile clinic will provide additional supporting services that will focus on bringing mental health services, healthcare and social services directly to our clients. As we strive to integrate our services by collocating a mobile clinic, we will focus on disease prevention and healthcare promotion through primary care, while employing a biopsychosocial approached with the goal of optimizing wellness within the population we serve. The objectives outline for the medical outreach program will focus on improved quality of care by using every advantage that is presented with a collocated model and the cross discipline solving techniques that will be available with coordinated care. This holistic approach will include a care team that will bring additional resources and will also focus on being the link to additional comprehensive services while monitoring treatment and outcomes. The integration of services can also prove to be cost effective by the flexibility it offers and by consolidating the resources currently available at WLCAC. The program will also be sustainable by using the working relationships it will have with other community health providers and by using the educational services provided by the University of Southern California. Providing medical services that touch upon primary care practice guidelines,... ... middle of paper ... ...arts. This will allow the staff to keep track of immunization records, and lab work while helping to monitor medication intake. The program will aim to measure its performance and will assess for service capacity, flexibility and delivery of services. The clinic will provide client questionnaire cards after every consultation in order to better assess for client satisfaction. The client questionnaire will focus on quality of service, recommendations, and treatment satisfaction. The questionnaires will be reviewed weekly and be look upon as an important tool for client input and overall program improvement. Internally the team along with the supporting staff will conduct a self assessment by using the Behavioral Health Integration Capacity Assessment (BHICA) that is aim at measuring service delivery and will help evaluate the program’s ability to implement integrated
Douglass, R., Torres, R., Surfus, P., Krinke, B., & Dale, L. (1999). Health Care Needs and Services Utilization Among Sheltered and Unsheltered Michigan Homeless. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Undeserved, 5-18.
Homelessness is one of the biggest issues society (Unites States) faces today. Homelessness is caused by lack of affordable housing, economic situations and decline in federal funding for low income families and the mentally ill. A homeless person is defined as an individual who lacks housing (without regard to whether the individual is a member of a family) including an individual whose primary residence during the night is a supervised public or private (shelters) facility that provides temporary living accommodations and an individual who is a resident in transitional housing. This definition of housing is used by the U.S Department of Healt...
...erging Adult Homeless in Two U.S. Cities. National Association of Social Workers, 58(2), 173-175. doi: 10.1093/sw/swt006
Sun, A., (2012). Helping homeless individuals with co-occurring disorders: The four components. National Association of Social Workers, 57(1), 23-37.
Gulcur, Leyla, Padgett, Deborah K., and Tsemberis, Sam. (2006). “Housing First Services for People Who Are Homeless with Co-Occurring Serious Mental Illness and Substance Abuse.” Research on Social Work Practice, Vol 16 No. 1.
A. Thomas McLellan, et al, "Individual characteristics of the literally homeless, marginally housed, and impoverished in a US substance abuse treatment-seeking sample." Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology 43, no. 10 (October 2008): 839-840, EBSCO Academic Search Premier (accessed April 4, 2012).
It is nearly impossible to walk between any two points in New Haven without being affected in some small way by our city’s homeless problem. On seeing these people, in many cases, it becomes clear that they suffer from some mental disability that, unaided, will obviously impede their living a normal life. In fact, according to the Report of the Federal Task Force on Homelessness and Severe Mental Illness, one in every three homeless people suffers from a severe mental illness, most of which are treatable. In a country that devotes so many resources to various welfare programs for nearly every group, how can this problem persist? The answer to this question lies in a major national policy shift, deinstitutionalization, which occurred progressively between 1960 and 1980. Though deinstitutionalization addressed a necessary problem, in practice, it only worsens the problems facing the mentally disabled and society at large. What prevailing social ideas and changes brought an end to our nation’s established system of state psychiatric hospitals? What is the logic behind our new and inefficient system of community centered outpatient mental health?
With the rising number of homeless rising every night it is becoming harder for the shelters to house them since they do not have enough space or resources available to help. Since 2013 there has not been a new report done to count how many homeless people are living in Phoenix, but one thing that is known is that an “anticipated 250 families in Maricopa County are homeless every night”(Taylor ). There are currently 13 shelters that house the homeless each night in Phoenix, AZ, many of them not only provide housing but also “services such as alcohol and drug rehab treatment along with clinics’ (Phoenix Homeless Shelters & Services for the Needy.) Though the shelters do provide some help there is not enough of them to provide the assistance and housing needed to help the homeless. The number of shelters is not enough and more need to be built with proper staffing and resources to help keep the homeless people out of the unforgiving Phoenix heat and possible death. If
The only limitation to the study is that it failed to mention any costs related to obtaining the services. And it did not mention any demographic variables with respect to race, average age, and levels of income and mental health status (at intake) of the population they served. According to Cummings (2009) at intake, clients suffered a greatly with their activities of daily living and were recently hospitalized for psychiatric issues. It would be unfair to assume that the current study took into account for any of these issues. The study was limited in revealing this pertinent information. Greater knowledge of the patient during intake may provide for greater accuracy in determining the correct agency to direct the prospective client. Other than that, the program appears very thorough in their service delivery.
...em to come to the same general conclusion: public health programs for the homeless are not as effective as they could be. Whether it is not providing full attention in the type of service that is provided or a lack of outreach by the programs, a majority of people are not receiving the care they need. Instead of criticizing homeless people for crowding the emergency rooms consider the fact that they typically do not have an easily accessible alternative for medical care. “Systems like the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program have spent the past decades building a public health program that now has helped find insurance for 76% of patients who come through” (Oppenheimer et al., 2010, p.1401). It is important that cities all across the country begin programs that will improve and eventually completely eliminate the health care inaccessibility for the homeless.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] used the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ definition of mental illness as “health conditions that are characterized by alterations in thinking, mood, or behavior (or some combination thereof) associated with distress and/or impaired functioning” (2011). Our community is exposed to a large number of individuals with mental illness. Among those individuals are the widespread homeless populations. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development reported “twenty-five percent of the sheltered homeless report a severe mental illness (as cited in Allender, Rector and Warner 2014 p. 907).” This author found the target population to be predominantly Caucasian, Non-Hispanic, single males of thirty-one years of age and older. In reviewing the research, this author found that multiple health disparities happen in conjunction with mental health and homelessness. This includes cardiac and respiratory issues and HIV/AIDs. Without the proper healthcare services, the homeless mental health population remains vulnerable.
Furthermore, facilities frequently concentrate on “quick-fix” interventions instead of focusing on their qualities that empower them and concentrating on long-term aspirations (Heinze & Jozefowicz-Simbeni, 2009). For the most part, it is extremely hard to access health care for the youth population because they face various restrictions. It is not surprising that many homeless adolescents do not have a way of seeking services even if they are the population that needs it the most. Homeless youth are at a higher risk of adverse outcomes such as not being able to further their education, getting incarcerated, developing a mental health disorder, and engaging in alcohol dependency and unsafe sexual behavior (Heinze & Jozefowicz-Simbeni, 2009). Children without a home are more prone to live in inconsistent and harsh living conditions categorized by family and school issues. Although; many homeless youths do not experience desirable outcomes housing programs and similar services serve a primary support system to help reduce homelessness. Services that promise better living conditions are shown to enhance lifestyles and a positive development into adulthood.
Although most people know what homelessness is and it occurs in most societies, it is important to define because the forces of displacement vary greatly, along with the arrangement and meaning of the resulting transient state. The Stewart B McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 defined a homeless person as “an individual who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate night-time residence or a person who resides in a shelter, welfare hotel, transitional program or place not ordinarily used as a regular sleeping accommodation, such as streets, cars, movie theaters, abandoned buildings, etc.” Resent surveys conducted in the U.S. have confirmed that the homeless population in America is extremely diverse and includes representatives from all segments of society, including: the old and young, men and women, single people and families, city dwellers and rural residents, whites and people of color, employed and unemployed, able workers and people with serious health problems. The diversity among people that are homeless reflects how difficult it is to generalize the causes of homelessness and the needs of homeless people. Robert Rosenheck M.D., the author of Special Populations of Homeless Americans, explains the importance of studying homelessness based on subgroups, “each subgroup [of homeless people] has unique service needs and identifying these needs is critical for program planning and design.” Despite these diversities, homelessness is a devastating situation for all that experience it. Not only have homeless people lost their dwelling, but they have also lost their safety, privacy, control, and domestic comfort.
Fitzpatrick, Joanne. “ONI Opening Doors Project—Improving Health for Homeless People and Families.” Community Practitioner 85.2 (2012): 19+. Academic OneFile. Web. 17 Oct. 2013.
Most of clients from St Mungos (which cares for the homeless) are victims of poverty, unemployment, little or no education and one form of disability or the other. Many were sleeping rough on the streets before being admitted into the home. Many lost their jobs or are unable to secure jobs due to criminal record and lack of education or employable skills. Many are products of broken homes and became involved in crime, alcoholism and drug misuse. All these led to their becoming victims of social exclusion. Hence, at St Mungos the understanding of social processes and the effects on clients underlies the provision of personalised services based on individual circumstances and