Mobile Palliative Care for Homeless

Kaiser Health News ran a story about a project that provides palliative care to individuals who are homeless and terminally ill. Mobile Team Offers Comfort Care To Homeless At Life’s End covers a pilot project in Seattle. “Since January 2014, the pilot project run by Seattle/King County Health Care for Homeless Network 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.” The project is funded through 2017 and is designed to avoid unneeded or unwanted care at the end of life while giving people who are homeless input in their care.  The care providers arrange for the clients to get medical treatment (through Medicaid or pro bono care), follow up with patients, help patients make decisions and care for them so they don’t die alone.

The mobile program has some advantages over other existing programs, such as going to where the patients are located and  the providers are “more likely to engage the hardest-to-reach patients, those distrustful of medical care and outsiders….”  Although the medical treatment is important, so far, the team is finding that coordination of care is a huge benefit of the mobile program.  Mobile palliative care programs do exist worldwide, but aren’t prevalent in the U.S. “Worldwide, there are only a few other mobile palliative care programs, all outside the U.S. The closest one in North America is the Palliative Education and Care for the Homeless program — known as PEACH — in Toronto.”