Mental health and substance use disorders are prevalent among people experiencing homelessness, yet access to care for these health issues is challenging for people living on the streets. Now, a new survey conducted by a team of researchers from USC Street Medicine found that, in California, street medicine programs are helping to fill this gap, delivering critical, high-level mental health and substance use treatments to the state's unsheltered population.
The survey, published in Community Mental Health Journal, shows that street medicine has the potential to serve as the basis for a strategy to expand access to behavioral health care for people who are unhoused.
"This survey showed that there is tremendous need for mental health and substance use services and that street medicine programs are providing more services and higher-level care out of necessity," said Brett Feldman, director and co-founder of USC Street Medicine, assistant professor of family medicine at Keck School of Medicine of USC, and one of the authors of the study. "We found that street medicine teams have trained up to provide a higher level of behavioral health care because there's little access to psychiatric care, especially on the street."
The authors noted that addressing the mental health and substance use problems, common among the state's homeless population, is one key to improving communities' efforts to address homelessness.
Need is great, resources are sparse
The researchers from the Keck School of Medicine surveyed 29 street medicine teams in California, 26 of which completed the survey. One was excluded because it is too new a program to have meaningful data. Street medicine organizations reported that 64% of their patients have mental health problems and 67% have substance use disorders. All but one of the street medicine programs provides some mental health and treatment for substance use disorders.
