By Hector Gonzalez
Staff Writer

January 20, 2015— A month-old partnership between the homeless services provider Ocean Park Community Center (OPCC) of Santa Monica and Saint John’s Health Center is yielding mutual benefits while speeding up services to homeless patients, officials said.

OPCC has worked closely in the past with Saint John’s and other Westside hospitals that refer their homeless patients to the nonprofit agency for services.

Now, however, an OPCC staff member is working in Saint John’s emergency unit, a first-of-its-kind arrangement that has benefited both organizations, officials said.

“We actually placed an OPCC staff member on site in the emergency department in the evening hours, from four to midnight,” said OPCC Executive Director John Maceri. “Previously we did not have an on-site staff presence in the emergency department.”

One goal of the pilot program launched last month is to allow OPCC staffers to “better understand how the hospital system works and what the barriers and challenges are from the hospital’s side,” Maceri said.

The program also gives OPCC staff a “boots on the ground, first-hand” look at who the homeless patients are who are coming to the emergency room for medical help, he said.

“It’ll really give us a much better understanding through a direct observational experience of what the needs of these individual are,” Maceri said.

In years past, hospitals like Saint John’s would typically stabilize a homeless patient medically, then discharge the person back out into the streets.

Local hospitals had few other options until OPCC a few years back began asking them to refer their patients directly to the nonprofit.

The new pilot program at Saint John’s “is an extension of that work,” Maceri said.
Already, OPCC staffers are seeing patterns among the homeless people coming to Saint John’s for emergency treatment, he said.

“Not surprisingly, we’re finding that there’s a very high incidence of severe mental illness,” Maceri said. “There’s a high level of addiction, as well as chronic health conditions.”

St. John’s emergency staff also have benefited from the program, so much so that E.R. nurses will discuss the program at a meeting of Southern California hospital officials next month at UCLA, said Sister Colleen Settles, vice president of missions at St. John’s.

Officials from other area hospitals “are very interesting in how this program is going, so that it can be replicated in all hospitals,” Settles said.  

Having an OPCC staffer working with emergency room personnel “is one of the biggest gifts we could have given to our emergency department,” she said.

“OPCC has the expertise in the culture of the homeless, which our staff doesn’t necessarily have,” Settle said. It’s been a major learning experience, she added.

“We never knew, for instance, why the homeless were always so concerned about the time when they would be discharged,” said Settles. “What we learned is that it’s because the shelters close at a certain time. The homeless know that if they’re not discharged by a certain time, they’re not going to get a bed for the night.”

By working with an OPCC staffer in the emergency room, St. John’s officials are learning how to “create a better transition for the homeless” so that they don’t end up returning with the same problems, she said.

“Once they’re discharged into the streets they might not heal as well as they need to. There would be a rebound back to the emergency room, which is not good for the patient and is not good for the hospital,” Settles said.

The goal for St. John’s now is to have an emergency room staffer trained by OPCC to better work with homeless patients and understand their needs, she added.

So far, the program has been “a win, win all around,” she said.

Maceri said once the three-month pilot program ends, officials will analyze the information gathered by staffers in the E.R. to come up with strategies to address the specific needs of homeless patients.

“The next stage will be to figure out what’s the most appropriate level of intervention and what are the kinds of intervention that are going to be most useful for these individuals,” said Maceri. “Right now, it’s a lot of data-gathering: Is it the same people coming to the E.R., what are their specific needs and issues, are there reoccurring themes that stand out? “Then will be able to better address those needs,” he said.