LOS ANGELES — A nonprofit community health center teaches the next generation how to treat homeless people medically. The Venice Family Clinic provides primary care to about 45,000 people in Los Angeles County, including some of the most vulnerable.
Students often join the clinic’s mobile teams as they’re out and about; they get hands-on lessons on how to provide care for people experiencing homelessness.
For physician assistant student Francesca Reinisch, her last semester at USC’s Keck School of Medicine is more than likely her most physically demanding yet, mostly because these days she’s rarely inside. This is the part in her studies when she helps actual patients.
Reinisch spent one of her clinical rotations working with the Venice Family Clinic’s Street Medicine Program. Reinisch and her teacher, Dr. Coley King, go to the patients.
There’s a team of people going out in the field, but not all are medical professionals. Usually there’s a social worker or a community member on hand who can meet individually with a prospective homeless patient first, and then introduce them to the medical team when the time is right.
They’ve helped with strained muscles and with navigating the strained housing system. This leads to adventures rarely written about in textbooks, like when one couple would not leave their beloved reptiles behind for shelter.
“Dr. King and I spent the day figuring out where to store their art, where to store these iguanas, and then getting them to their housing and it took all day and it wasn’t necessarily the role I thought I would play being a street medicine provider, but I loved it,” Reinisch said.
King mentors many students as the clinic’s director of homeless health care services.
“That’s an incredibly powerful disease syndrome if we look at chronic homelessness as a medical illness that can take up to 25 or 30 years off someone’s lifespan,” King said.
Starting with what to pack before a shift, King taught Reinisch everything. Now this wisdom has been written into a detailed and free training guide called “The Street Medicine Curriculum.”
“This is just our humble beginnings to start to codify some training of what we think are the tools necessary to see a patient in the street,” King said.
With this, they hope to improve care and demystify this field.
“The idea of street medicine seems like very exciting, but then when you think about going out there as a student or a fresh, newly graduated provider it can seem a little bit intimidating,” Reinisch said.
After several weeks, Reinisch is a lot more confident, enough to know for sure she wants to keep helping the underserved.
Established in the 1980s, the Street Medicine Program has grown to nine teams with eleven health care providers.