Street Health Outreach and Wellness

By Amanda Jepson | Categories: | Comments Off on Street Health Outreach and Wellness

During the COVID-19 pandemic, NYC Health + Hospitals recognized that New Yorkers experiencing unsheltered homelessness faced unique challenges accessing COVID-19 testing and vaccination. As the city’s public hospital system and the largest municipal health care system in the nation, the health system had a unique opportunity to leverage its size and spread to bring street medicine services across New York City. NYC Health + Hospitals launched the Street Health Outreach and Wellness (SHOW) program, which quickly evolved to include basic medical care, harm reduction education, and links to other care and services.  

SHOW aims to meet patients where they are, build trust, and use longitudinal care relationships to drive positive outcomes in both health and housing. NYC Health + Hospitals currently operates five mobile street medicine units, each connected to one of the system’s facilities and staffed by providers from within those facilities’ primary care safety net (PCSN) clinics. Mobile units, based within communities those hospitals serve, each are staffed with a medical provider, registered nurse, social worker, addiction counselor, peer counselor, community health worker, and registration clerk. The program provides primary care, wound care, mental health support, harm reduction services, and basic material necessities to unsheltered residents in New York City, while connecting patients with the health system’s larger continuum of care via PCSN clinics, specialty care, and other services. 

The health system works with multiple partners in this effort, including the New York City Department of Homeless Services, as well as numerous community-based organizations and service providers. These partnerships drive the program’s ability to link patients to services and shelter, as SHOW and NYC Health + Hospitals work to support and strengthen the ecosystem of care for people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. 

Since the program’s April 2021 launch, SHOW teams have had more than 233,000 engagements with community members and provided 21,000 medical consultations, 9,000 vaccinations, and 60,000 social work engagements. In the last year, as the program evolved its model, more than 1,000 unique patients established care with the SHOW teams, and the program connected nearly 200 individuals with PCSN clinics for ongoing care. All this work feeds into systemwide goals of improving chronic condition outcomes for patients experiencing homelessness, and ultimately, connecting patients into housing.