More South County homeless receive health care

Local officials are reporting a sharp uptick in homeless people seeking health services in South County – a trend they credit to successful outreach.

South County patient encounters with the Valley Homeless Healthcare Program — which provides mobile and fixed-site primary care, substance abuse and oral health services — have exceeded last year’s totals. As of September, Santa Clara County seen 356 patients and conducted 857 appointments and visits — which either take the form of South County patients seeking out the program’s medical bus, or health care workers going out to farms and city streets to reach patients where they are.

The numbers reflect an uptick from last year’s total of 330 patients and 838 visits. By the end of the year, the county expects to reach 475 patients — a 44% increase from last year.

“We’re doing a better job of connecting people with services. It’s outreach,” Sara Jeevanjee, the Valley Homeless Healthcare Program medical director, told San José Spotlight. “We have a community health worker who goes and finds individuals in need and builds that relationship.”

Kristi Rouss, an assistant nurse manager with the program, said there’s hesitation among communities to seek services, especially farmworkers with unstable housing situations who are wary of federal immigration enforcement actions.

“One thing we noticed with migrant farmworker clinics — last year it was difficult for us to find clients, and toward the end of the season last year we had to figure out where they were and locate them,” Rouss told San José Spotlight. “This year we were better at it. We knew where they were. We had the same team that was there last year. We were able to build that rapport. That could be a big reason why the number has increased.”

Homeless advocates say unhoused people become more reliant on county services when they’re destabilized — swept from an encampment they’ve called home for several years, where their support networks lived and case workers could find them. In early November, Valley Water swept about 60 people from encampments on two of its properties near creeks in Gilroy. At the time, advocates raised alarms that the residents had nowhere to go. Meanwhile, South County’s vast stretches of rural land have historically been challenged with a dearth of health care services.

“That increases the need for medical care, as people are moved from a more contained situation out to a more dangerous situation,” Jan Bernstein Chargin, a South County homeless advocate and co-founder of the food distribution service Pitstop Outreach, told San José Spotlight.

While Bernstein Chargin praised the county’s mobile homeless health care services because they’re tailored to people’s situations, she said there are still gaps. The volunteer will drive around the streets of Gilroy and encounter, from time to time, homeless people still wearing their hospital gowns or wristbands.

Homeless people are frequent hospital visitors due to chronic illness and disability, and Bernstein Chargin said there’s been a problem with patients being released back onto the streets with no referrals to housing. She said the Santa Clara County Office of Supportive Housing recently met with social workers at St. Louis Hospital to try to increase referrals for respite care.

“What’s frustrating is to see the same person repeatedly going into the emergency room, getting stabilized and then getting put back out on the street where they quickly destabilize,” she said. “This is the cycle that’s not getting them housed, and it’s not a good use of tax dollars either. But the biggest part is that it’s not a good way to take care of sick people.”Bernstein Chargin said the county’s medical bus, which comes down on Tuesdays and Fridays, has always been well attended. She added that outreach groups have been effective at getting people proper care with strategies such as backpack medicine, which visits people in the encampments. The team is trusted to the extent that advocates try to keep an open line of communication with them.

She said the county program’s workers are well trusted.

“The doctors are loved. And when I hear that the county is having budget issues, my fear is always that something’s going to happen to that program,” Bernstein Chargin said.

Contact Brandon Pho at [email protected] or @brandonphooo on X.