Two years after opening the Caritas Center, its family shelter and service center in downtown Santa Rosa, Catholic Charities believes it has successfully tested a key element in the fight against homelessness: improving the health of homeless people.

The North Bay’s largest provider of homeless services came to this conclusion based on an existing partnership with Santa Rosa Community Health (SRCH), a local consortium of community medical clinics.

Under the agreement, SRCH opened a full-service clinic – the Santa Rosa Community Health Clinic – at the Caritas Center three months after its opening in August 2022.

The results of this collaboration have led to improvements in the health of the homeless, including fewer repeat visits to hospitals and emergency rooms. These improvements have resulted in people finding housing more quickly, the two organizations say.

A recent joint strategy paper by Catholic Charities and SRCH, entitled “United in Health and Home: a Progress and Challenges Brief,” puts it bluntly: “Health and homelessness are inextricably linked: to solve the problem of homelessness, we must look at it from a health perspective.”

The document was released Thursday at an event for elected officials, policy makers, donors and other supporters at the Caritas Center.

“The synergy between the Caritas Center and the Santa Rosa Community Health Clinic is an example of the power of proximity,” said Jennielynn Holmes, CEO of Catholic Charities, to a crowd of nearly 100 people gathered at the facility’s drop-in center on 6th Street.

According to the newspaper, Catholic Charities served 2,242 people in its first year, a 13% increase over the period before the center opened.

In the almost two years since the Caritas Center clinic opened, the SRCH has cared for 4,270 patients, including 319 under the age of 18 and 86 pregnant women.

The document also notes that in the Caritas centre’s first year of operation, Catholic Charities “was able to place individuals permanently in half the time (on average around three months) that it took before Caritas was in place. This was due to increased room numbers for families, a larger drop-in centre and our new Nightingale programme for rehabilitation.”

The 33-bed Nightingale programme at the Caritas centre is a place where homeless people can recover after hospitalisation, rather than returning to the streets or a homeless shelter. The paper recommends increasing the number of such facilities to help people transition from hospital care to housing.

Located together, working together

The basic mechanism of the collaboration between Catholic Charities and Santa Rosa Community Health is to provide health services in a location where homeless people are also supported in many other ways (at the Caritas Center, this includes emergency shelters, transitional housing, a daycare center, and other services for youth and families).

The strategy paper states: “Caritas Village is based on partnerships and the provision of a comprehensive range of care and services to those who come to us, enabling access to all resources in one place.”

This has made it possible to provide a range of health services more easily and efficiently to people who visit or live at the Caritas Centre. Otherwise, they would face significant hurdles ranging from a lack of transportation to a lack of trust in providers. For example, the health clinic operates a fully equipped minibus that is parked outside the Caritas Centre to assess and treat people who are unwilling or unable to go to the second floor to visit the in-house facility.

Both the fixed and mobile clinics are examples of the increasingly popular principle of meeting patients where they are, says Gaby Bernal Leroi, CEO of Santa Rosa Community Health and co-author of the strategy paper with Holmes.

“It allows our medical team to build trust because you’re out there looking for them and you’re there for them wherever they are. And then they can find you at the center as well,” Bernal Leroi said in an interview. “The concept of meeting them where they are is really about familiarity and building trust with individuals.”

The partnership makes it easier for SRCH staff to care for the health needs of homeless patients, Bernal Leroi said. For example, if a patient misses an appointment and shows up at the Caritas center for other reasons — such as visiting the drop-in center or using other services — Catholic Charities staff can notify clinical staff, who can then care for the patient.

“It is so much easier to keep an eye on the clients and make sure they are using the other services because we can take them there to give them a place to stay or a shower and then Caritas can take them back up,” says Bernal Leroi.