They arrive on their own, worried about what was really in that bag of heroin. Some are carried in, slumped between two friends. Others are lifted off the sidewalk or asphalt of a nearby alley and rolled in a wheelchair to what’s known as SPOT, or the Supportive Place for Observation and Treatment, at the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program (BHCHP).
Dr. Avik Chatterjee, a doctor trained in internal medicine and pediatrics, has been taking care of homeless patients out of a medical van as part of an outreach program at Boston Health Care for the Homeless for the past three years.
Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program partnered with the Red Sox Foundation to collect 5,100 pairs of socks and $2,100 in their Sox for Socks charity drive at Fenway on June 3-5. BHCHP hands out clean socks to homeless patients in their 60 locations and on the street.
Dr. Jim O’Connell is one cool dude.
He’s a professor at Harvard Med and Mass General, president of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program (BHCHP), and he’s spent more than three decades treating homeless patients.
I was recently given a rather astonishing little book called “Stories From the Shadows,” by James J. O’Connell, M.D. “Dr. Jim,” as he’s known on the streets of Boston, where for 30 years he has been bringing medical treatment to the homeless, is a scrupulous clinician and a skillful writer, and his book takes the form — outwardly — of a sequence of case histories and clinical encounters.
Warren Magee, 46, is one of the new residents of Francis Grady Apartments, a 30-unit development for the formerly homeless that recently opened in Jamaica Plain. An adjacent development, the 20-bed Stacy Kirkpatrick House, will provide short-term health care for homeless patients, helping to address a chronic need.
Almost a quarter of the patients we care for at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program are living with hepatitis C, a disease that contributes greatly to health care utilization and cost. We’ve worked hard to increase access to the lifesaving treatments the Globe reported on this month, and our early outcomes have been overwhelmingly successful.
To those who live on the streets, Stacy Kirkpatrick was more than just a nurse practitioner at Boston Health Care for the Homeless — more than a caregiver who brought her healing presence to shelters. “She was my family,” said Larry Adams, who was her patient for many years.
“I was homeless and I was an addict. I was all messed up. I’m the kind of person, I don’t trust nobody,” said Adams, who helped found and chaired the health care agency’s Consumer Advisory Board. He put his faith in Ms. Kirkpatrick, however. “Her word was gospel. Whatever she said, I did. As a matter of fact, the reason I’m here is she saved my life.”
It has become a grim workplace routine: the “code blue” crackling over the loudspeaker. The all-hands-on-deck emergency response. Then, in more than half the calls, the discovery of a nonresponsive person — blue lips, shallow breathing, and constricted pupils, all telltale signs of a drug overdose.
“It’s happening everywhere,” said Dr. Jessie Gaeta, chief medical officer at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, headquartered in the South End neighborhood infamously nicknamed Methadone Mile.
The $10 million-plus complex, funded by a mix of city and state affordable housing funds, is a joint project of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program and the nonprofit Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corp.
Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program receives HHS funding and has Federal PHS deemed status with respect to certain health or health-related claims, including medical malpractice claims, for itself and its covered individuals.
