Taking it to the Streets!

“I’m really afraid that there are going to be more of you than there are people on Skid Row,” our host told us.

She was addressing a room full of 170 doctors and nurses who are heading out to practice medicine on the street as part of the International Street Medicine Symposium. Dr. Susan Partovi and Michael Arnold have worked to serve as our hosts in L.A. And have organized teams that will invade homeless camps throughout the city.

Yesterday I got to welcome everyone to this year’s Symposium. It is the sixth one and it continues to grow every year. I serve as the Chairman of the Board of Directors and am one of the few non-medical people associated with the effort.

What started out as a small grass roots movement in Pittsburgh has grown and we’ve invaded Santa Barbara, Houston, San Juan, Atlanta and now L.A. And these folks are doing amazing and holy work.

Hand held electronic medical records that can submit for billing as health care is being delivered is ground breaking stuff. These folks are preparing for the future of health care which will turn the current system on its head.

Now if you are sick you have to drag yourself out of bed and go to where health care is --- be it a hospital, a Health Care Center, or a doctor’s office.

If you step back and take a look at that system, something is wrong. It is the responsibility of the person who is sick to go to where the help is. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Should help go to where the need is?

Doctors used to make house calls because they understood this back then. Fewer people were admitted to hospitals because of this. Health care costs were a lot cheaper. Insurance companies didn’t rule who got what and how.

So today these guys are demonstrating that all over again and they are starting with the worst of the worst, crazy and intoxicated people living under bridges, in abandoned buildings and on subway grates! And they are pulling it off!

These crazy patients stop going to emergency rooms and getting arrested thereby saving the rest of us millions of dollars. They learn to trust people again, get properly diagnosed, stabilize and move into their own apartment. They get jobs and then they pay their own way. Some always will need someone to hold their hand but this is a hell of a lot cheaper than continuing to arrest them over and over again. And it stops them from going to the hospital emergency room multiple times every month.

My friend Johnny O loves to look at the mug shots posted every day by the Savannah Metro Police Department. He is looking for his friends I think, but then again Johnny O is not like the rest of us! He finds amusement in the craziest of places.

“We could save ourselves a lot of money if we’d stop arresting the same person over and over and over again,” he recently told me sitting at the counter of the Breakfast Club. “These are people who drink, are sick, and get arrested for peeing in the bushes. It’d be cheaper to do it another way.”

And he is exactly right. And the Street Medicine movement is proving that! And after it is proven with the crazy and drunk person bundled in multiple clothes and pushing a grocery cart full of crap, then we’ll swim upstream and prove that it is cheaper to take health care to the rest of us too.

And soon I hope, when we are sick and hurting in our bed, a nurse or a doctor comes to us. Rather than making us go to them.

I mean this stuff isn’t rocket science.