How Midwest Street Medicine is bridging health equity gaps for the homeless

Making the transition from the street to permanent housing can be difficult - it's hard to force people to seek help. San Francisco works to help the homeless rise from the poverty cycle by pinpointing the most chronically homeless people on the street and urge them into services.

Refugee camps save lives in emergencies – but often refugees languish there for decades. Two columns on programs that allow refugees to live normally in cities, with an ATM card taking the place of a camp.

Through the Burbank Senior Artists Colony - a community created by EngAGE - low-income seniors learn how to become artists. The recreational classes hosted by the community keep people feeling phsyically and mentally young, allowing them to focus on recreation instead of financial hardship.

Milwaukee County’s mental health system put more resources in expensive emergency care rather than invest in programs that offer continual care. As a result, Milwaukee County identifies nine solutions from other cities that have had success in repairing mental health systems. Solutions include the ending of reliance on emergency care, expand community support programs, change laws, and supportive housing.

Should housing be considered a form of healthcare? New York State thinks so, and is funding "supportive housing" through the state's Medicaid program.

Many of the errors in our homelessness policies have stemmed from the conception that the homeless are a homogeneous group. It’s only in the past 15 years that organizations like Common Ground, and others, have taken a more granular, street-level view of the problem — disaggregating the “episodically homeless” from the “chronically homeless” in order to understand their needs at an individual level.

It's unusual for health programs to find it financially beneficial to send a home visitor regularly to help patients. But medical programs in various parts of the United States are experimenting with using peer groups to help people stick to their treatment plans, and it is working.

The mobile phone is doing more than revolutionizing communication. It has the potential to improve many aspects of life in poor countries: commerce, health, agriculture, education - public health, especially, is being revolutionized by governments taking advantage of the mobile revolution by texting advice or sending voice messages to pregnant women, texting reminders to AIDS patients to take their meds, tracking the spread of diseases, allowing community health workers to keep records electronically and variations on all these themes.

Nutrition labeling on sugary drinks hardly gives understandable measurements so that consumers can make informed choices for their well-being. Outside of the United States, other countries like Mexico have tried the “12 teaspoonfuls” campaign that clearly informs consumers what is in their soda, and Ecuador has tried the traffic-light label to demonstrate nutrition information through colorful symbols. Both of these approaches have shown to be successful at reducing the consumption of high-sugar goods.

Hepatitis C is a deadly disease that has yet to be eradicated in the United States (and worldwide). Organizations in El Paso and across the country are working to get people tested and treated for the virus.