homeless County gives OPCC $1M to treat, house down and out
By ALEXANDRA BISSONNETTE Special to the Daily Press
DOWNTOWN Los Angeles County officials have awarded homeless services provider OPCC with a roughly $1million grant in an effort to prevent patient dumping and provide medical care as a gateway into permanent housing.
The grant from the county’s Homeless and Housing Program Fund will finance OPCC’s Project HEARTH (Healthcare for Empowerment to Access Respite, Treatment and Housing) over a three-year period, which is expected to begin at the end of July.
The $1.080 million grant is part of the 2006 Homeless Prevention Initiative that allocated $32 million for specific city and community programs aiming to increase permanent housing for the homeless in the Los Angeles area.
“Homeless individuals have a lot of untreated physical health issues,” said John Maceri, executive director of OPCC, which is based in Santa Monica.“And we aim to meet their basic needs.”
The project entails a partnership between OPCC, the Venice Family Clinic, St. John’s Health Center and Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center.
Project HEARTH was created based on the demonstrated success of the 2007 Street Medicine pilot project, a joint effort between Venice Family Clinic and OPCC’s outreach team, which sent a physician with medical supplies into the streets to treat chronically ill homeless and to encourage involvement in the support services available to them.
Project HEARTH expands the concept behind “street medicine” by providing medical care in two fully equipped medical exam rooms at the OPCC Annenberg Access Center on Cloverfield Boulevard. Medical treatment will be provided five days a week and there will be a doctor and nurse on staff.
By combining the two services, the project will combat the challenges associated with “patient dumping” in which homeless individuals are released from hospitals and dropped off at shelters or other locations without follow up care or the necessary means to recuperate, Maceri said.
Project HEARTH will provide housing during the recovery period and opportunities for further involvement with housing programs.
It “directly addresses the most critical barrier to permanent housing in Santa Monica: The shortage of affordable rental housing that results in property owners choosing not to participate in housing subsidy programs,” Maceri said. “HEARTH will put a full-time housing coordinator in place to work with property owners to promote acceptance of subsidized tenants, and to support successful landlord/tenant relationships.”
The partnership will allow OPCC, Venice Family Clinic, and the two local hospitals to design a discharge planning system to ensure that homeless individuals will not have to return to the street for recovery.
“Most people who are released from the hospital need follow-up care, medications management, good nutrition, and monitoring,” said LaTisha Starbuck, vice president of Mission and Ethics at St. John’s. “HEARTH will allow OPCC and Venice Family Clinic to help patients recover in housing rather than on the street, and give them the permanent housing opportunities that will benefit their health and welfare in the long term.”
The project will also establish primary health care to prevent unnecessary hospitalizations of homeless patients that burden emergency room staff and needlessly fill hospital beds.
“OPCC’s new program will help prevent hospital admissions and lengthy hospital stays for homeless people through early treatment at the Access Center and new resources for discharge planners,” said Dr. Martin Chenevert, assistant director of the Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center’s emergency room.“If a person goes to a bed instead of the street, we are more confident that they will recuperate from their illness or injury, and be less likely to end up back in the emergency room.”
While the OPCC’s HEARTH project has been approved to receive the grant, negotiations are still underway to evaluate fiscal and program benchmarks.
“The goal is to get the money onto the streets as quickly as possible,” said Leepi Shimkhada, project manager at the L.A. Community Development Commission.
The commission will monitor all programs receiving funding to evaluate performance and assess program accomplishments.
Some of the benchmarks already in place include serving 500 patients with primary health care per year, and over the course of three years placing 200 people in permanent housing, Maceri said.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 29, 2008. Read the original PDF.