The Rhode Island Medical Advocacy project is a collaborative effort between the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project and Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE) – a student group based at Brown University.
Our aim is to spread awareness of the plight of homeless people in the medical system of the state of Rhode Island, and draw particular attention to health-related issues associated with having limited or no access to adequate shelter, food, or hot water, etc. through the medium of sensitivity training, discussion and advocacy.
Our mission statement:
‘Fostering an understanding between the homeless and medical communities through education and discussion about the realities of homelessness and the constraints of the emergency medical environment.’
The project was initiated in the fall of 2010 by Barbara Kalil and John Freitas, who had been working on a Nighttime Outreach program, meeting with those out on the streets of Providence, and they had witnessed a lack of appropriate care and compassion from the authorities in the health system. To better define the scope and the scale of challenges facing the homeless in Rhode Island health system, they decided to survey homeless citizens of Providence, in collaboration with HOPE. Heading out onto meal sites and other city locations they gathered what they describe as “horror stories” from people who faced the neglect of the health system.
By spring 2011, the results of the survey had been fully compiled and they were shocking.
n Homeless individuals felt treated like “non-persons” in the emergency room.
n Emergency response teams and doctors often falsely accused homeless individuals of drunkenness or drug abuse without evidence or examination. They were also wrongly dismissed from ERs as freeloaders; only after free food and a bed, in spite of suffering from real illnesses.
n Hospital staff were insensitive to the circumstances of the homeless, e.g. discharge at 4.30am when shelters are closed.
n An overwhelming majority of homeless people felt that they had been “rushed through” the ER because of their homeless status, or generally treated differently.
n Emergency medical care, including life-saving surgery was denied to people, based on their homeless status, and as a result of this blatant discrimination, lives were lost.
As a reaction to this discrimination and lack of care and facilities for the homeless community of Rhode Island, John, Barbara and the HOPE students decided to create a subgroup specifically dedicated to promoting sensitivity for the needs of the homeless community in the healthcare system – and RIMAP was born in spring 2011 to advocate for the provision of this sensitivity.
Members of RIMAP hit the ground running in their fight for the equal treatment of the homeless under the health system – approaching the RI Hospital, Miriam Hospital, Butler Hospital, RI Department of Health and RI Department of Public Safety, but they had quite a lot of difficulty grabbing the attention of those who could help spread our message, or change policy – namely hospitals who often shunned John and Barbara and misdirected them to the wrong place or person, etc. meaning that they had to rely on chance meetings with medical professionals to spread our message. The state Health and Public Safety departments were more supportive, giving us the green light to proliferate sensitivity trainings to medical professionals where we can.
In RIMAP currently, we are working towards advocating for the sensitivity training of upcoming medical professionals and as a result we are working on strengthening our ties with the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and other health-related groups at an undergraduate level at Brown – so that the next generation of American doctors can be more conscious of the needs of the homeless from the beginning of their careers.
We work closely with the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project (RIHAP) and we meet weekly to discuss progress on the issues with which we are so impassioned and those of the rest of the HOPE group – such as new difficulties encountered during HOPE’s Nighttime Outreach program, how to improve ties to our partners in the health sector and, most importantly, the next steps to take in the fight for the equal treatment of, and care for, the Rhode Island homeless community.
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