Mobile Team Offers Care to Seriously-Ill Homeless

Mobile Team Offers Care to Seriously-Ill Homeless

This week, USA Today brought attention to what experts are calling the first U.S. program that sends mobile teams to provide palliative care  to homeless people facing serious illness. The effort, funded through 2017 by a federal grant of $170,000 a year, aims to reduce unnecessary care due to their illnesses, as well as to give them a say in the process. Since January 2014, the pilot project run by the University of Washington’s school of public health and UW Medicine’s Harborview Medical Center has served more than 100 seriously ill men and women in the Seattle area, tracking them down at shelters and drop-in clinics, in tents under bridges and parked cars.

“It’s really necessary that people be taken care of where they are,” said Dr. Daniel Lam, director of inpatient and outpatient palliative care services. Click here for more.