LOS ANGELES — Inside a van outside the Wallis House at Aviva Family and Children’s Services, a Hollywood shelter for women and kids, 34-year-old Christian Thomas is getting her blood sugar tested.
“I just like to keep one up on my health,” said Thomas, a diabetic.
Jeffrey Figueroa, a Medical Assistant at Saban Community Clinic for the last 19 years, follows up with questions about her diet and medicine she is taking. In the past, they would have done this medical visit in a conference room or cafeteria in the shelter. Now they have privacy and technology all packed inside a sleek mobile clinic.
“It’s been amazing,” said Samantha Kumpf, a physician assistant at Saban. Kumpf said Saban’s newly unveiled mobile clinic has been a game-changer.
“[It] allows us to do so much more and provide such a higher quality of care,” Kumpf said. “We have privacy so we can do more sensitive exams, or pelvic exams, and cervical cancer screenings. We have a full lab in here so we can draw blood, even do some small procedures.”
The mobile clinic has led to patient interest doubling or tripling. When Spectrum News visited, 10 people were signed up for services at just one site.
When they finish, Figueroa pulls double-duty as the van’s driver, taking it to 13 different transitional housing sites or shelters in the area.
Saban Community Clinic conducted over 90,000 medical visits last year. They’re hoping their new mobile clinic will help them do even more this year. But while Saban has been working over the last 55 years to improve their offerings to people without homes through things like the mobile clinic, factors beyond their control could hurt their outreach.
LA’s new municipal code 41.18 will lead to more encampment sweeps. Kumpf said she has seen how these can erode trust and cause interruptions in care.
“I was providing primary care and mental health care for a patient with schizophrenia and high blood pressure and several other chronic conditions, and I was seeing him regularly every week, and then his street was swept. For the following weeks we drove around, we tried to look at all his usual spots, we tried to look anywhere we thought he might be, but didn’t find him again for, I think, seven months. His mental health had really deteriorated, and it was sad to see,” she said.
And that’s why consistency is so important, she said, not just for continued care but to build trust.
“It’s such an important field of medicine I think too, because it really does reach people who really need the care and otherwise might not be getting it.”
And that is now even easier to do, with Figueroa, Kumpf and Saban’s Mobile Clinic.