[Article] Hospitals find ways to navigate homeless into shelters

From the 6 November 2013 Los Angeles Daily News article

WOODLAND HILLS >> Almost once a week, Guadalupe Tolentino’s liver and bloodstream drown in liquor and sorrow, and that gets him a free ambulance ride to Kaiser Permanente’s Emergency Department.

There, doctors and nurses flush the alcohol out of the 55-year-old man’s veins with IV fluids, calm his tremors with vitamins and medications and, if he stays long enough, provide him a meal and clean clothes.

Despite an existence in crisis, liquor is never far from Tolentino’s mind, and neither is Kaiser’s emergency department in Woodland Hills, which he visits up to 40 times a year.

For Tolentino and other chronic homeless men and women like him, the emergency department is a place of stability and peace, where the sound of rushing crash carts and the beeps of telemetry monitors can be a lullaby compared to the sounds of sleeping on the streets.

But for the hospital’s “homeless navigator” Jonathan Lopez, those such as Tolentino, known as frequent flyers, also are never far from his mind. Most pose no harm, but those repeated returns show that their chronic drug or alcohol dependence as well as their homelessness go untreated. And it means the hospital pays an average of $1,500 a night for their stay, money that is never recuperated.

“When a frequent flyer returns to our ED my adrenalin gets going,” said Lopez, “I instantly start to process where I might be able to coordinate a placement,” Lopez said. “I get to relate to these individuals in an extraordinary way.”

Hospitals around the country have been increasingly using homeless navigators to help place indigent men and women into treatments centers or housing after discharge. In the Kaiser system, which has 14 medical centers in Southern California, Lopez’s position is part of a first-of-its-kind, two-year-old pilot program launched at the Woodland Hills campus. He said he crafted the program after watching a similar approach formed by the San Gabriel Valley Consortium on Homelessness.

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Read the entire article here

 

Drug Abuse Warning Network, 2011: National Estimates of Drug – Related Emergency Department Visits

drugs redux (Photo credit: Phoenix Dark-Knight)

 

Summary of the paper from Full Text Reports

 

Drug Abuse Warning Network, 2011: National Estimates of Drug – Related Emergency Department Visits (PDF)
Source: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

This publication presents national estimates of drug – related visits to hospital emergency departments (EDs) for the calendar year 2011 , based on data from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN). Also presented are comparisons of 20 11 estimates with those for 2004, 200 9, and 2010 . DAWN is a public health surveillance system that monitors drug – related ED visits for the Nation and for selected metropolitan areas. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is the agency responsible for DAWN. SAMHSA is required to collect data on drug – related ED visits under S ection 505 of the Public Health Service Act.

DAWN relies on a nationally representative sample of general, non – Federal hospitals operating 24 – hour EDs , with oversampling of hospitals in selected metropolitan areas. In each participating hospital, ED medical records are reviewed retrospectively to find the ED visits that involved recent drug use. All types of drugs — illegal drugs, prescription drugs, over – the – counter pharmaceuticals (e.g., dietary supplements, cough medicine), and substances inhaled for their psychoact ive effects — are included. Alcohol is considered an illicit drug when consumed by patients aged 20 or younger. For patients aged 21 or older, though, alcohol is reported only when it is used in conjunction with other drugs.

Marked findings of this report a re (a) a 29 percent increase in the number of drug – related ED visits involving illicit drugs in the short term between 2009 and 2011 ; (b) simultaneous, short – term increases in the involvement of b oth illicit and licit stimulant – like drugs ; and (c) some ind ications that the pace of increases in pharmaceutical involvement is slowing down.

 

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Focus on Community Resilience

A 2012 study by the RAND Corporation

Resilient communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from natural and man-made disasters. RAND has implemented and evaluated community resilience-building activities worldwide and identified opportunities to integrate governments with the nonprofit and for-profit sectors in public health and emergency preparedness, infrastructure protection, and development of economic recovery programs.

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