California Doctors Drafting Policies To Help Tackle Homelessness

Speaker 1: 00:00 A new state law requires hospitals provide additional services to homeless patients before they're discharged. But the California medical association says the well-intentioned law to prevent patient dumping is overcrowding emergency rooms. The groups doctors recently met to discuss how the medical community can address the root problem. KPBS health reporter Taren Minto spoke with the associations. Former president dr Ted Mazer, dr maser, thank you so much for joining me. How can medical professionals affect policy to address homelessness? Speaker 2: 00:33 We have to connect people who are homeless that show up in our emergency rooms or hospitals or offices to services. That's very important, but it's also very expensive and we got presentations showing that emergency rooms, particularly in the Bay area in Los Angeles, are now backed up with people who we can't find places for shelters for and they're not allowed to be discharged. So the emergency rooms are now sheltering, blocking other patients coming in on a broader level. The California medical association is able to work with both local, state and federal officials for that matter in dealing with health care issues. So we have the able, the ability to take our policies into either legislation or regulation or focus by leaders. What are your policies? Well, number one is recognizing that homelessness is about not just a roof over your head but the need to find a way to get a roof over your head. Speaker 2: 01:23 But once we do that, we can't stop looking at the needs of that population or they're going to end up back homeless again on the street and their health and the health of the communities being affected. So we're looking at ways of tying together mental health services, general health services, food services for people who have no access to food. Mental health is a key issue here. We know that, we've known that for years, but not everybody on the street has a mental health issues. Some of them have other reasons for being on the street, simple poverty. We can look at how healthcare itself, the lack of access to healthcare has contributed to some of those people being on the street, be it because they couldn't afford the health care or they received health care and unfortunately didn't have proper coverage for that healthcare. Speaker 1: 02:08 This has been discussed before, so what new are you are doctors, medical professionals bringing to the table that it's, you know, San Diego has an already spent thousands, millions of dollars trying to do, Speaker 2: 02:19 we're trying to focus to actually say these are the things that we believe you can focus the expenditure on. Be efficient in doing that and stop the cycle of homelessness, the cycle of sending people back on the street. As an example, if we look at the emergency room situation right now, it's improper. It's actually a real negative that we're taking up up to a third of beds in emergency rooms on people who are simply looking for placement. So physicians are going to focus on getting the services to move those patients into the proper level of help, not care. They don't need any further healthcare at that moment. How do you make that happen? You have to work with the regulators have to get, some of the regulations that are passed in good faith are actually harmful. So the idea that a hospital emergency room is now responsible for someone who walked in with a laceration but as homeless and they have to take valuable resources, both financial and space, the beds in the hospital and find a place to put that homeless person putting the onus on an emergency room physician on a hospital emergency room to find homeless people, a shelter blocking other people for access to healthcare. Speaker 2: 03:30 That's the improper, it's expensive. It's injurious to the rest of the population. So now we have to go back and look at those regulations and say, how do we modify the regulations and say, here's another agency that's in existence that needs to be the front line. Once the patient is ready for discharge from the hospital or the emergency room, it shouldn't be the ER doctors problem for placement. We understand placement's important, but they have other things to do. Policy's great, but it needs to actually be implemented. Absolutely. We know that we have the governor's task force. We have two co-sponsors presenting to us, taking our questions, helping us develop that policy that we now have definitive ways to back the governor, the legislature, the people who are trying to do this in their local communities and say, okay, the physicians of California are behind this. We will put our resources, we will go to the legislature and push next year's bills that are starting to come out already for the next site, the next session, starting in January and put our lobbying efforts into the bills, put our time, our experience, our resources, into the governor's task force to help move this forward instead of just talking about it. Well, thank you very much for your time, dr Mazer. Sure. Thank you. Yeah, it was KPBS health reporter Taryn Mintos speaking with San Diego physician and former California medical association president Ted Mazer. Speaker 3: 04:58 [inaudible].