Hospital dumps man, 78, at Sacramento homeless shelter
SACRAMENTO — Arlan Lewis, nearly 78 years old and hobbled by arthritis in his right hip, remembers feeling disoriented when a taxi dropped him in front of Sacramento’s Union Gospel Mission one afternoon last month.
He had just been discharged from Woodland Memorial Hospital, about 20 miles away, where he had spent more than a week undergoing psychiatric evaluations after sheriff ’s deputies picked him up in Carmichael as a potential danger to himself or others.
Lewis, a former cook who recently had become homeless after his Social Security check no longer covered his rent, had not asked to be taken to the mission. Standing in an unfamiliar place where dozens of grizzled men were sprawled along the sidewalk waiting for one of the agency’s 60 shelter beds, he approached swing shift supervisor Bobby Chatman.
“I have a reservation,” Chatman recalled Lewis saying. Chatman said Lewis showed him his hospital paperwork, which directed he be sent to the mission. But the shelter had no bed for Lewis. It does not take reservations.
“It doesn’t work that way here,” Chatman told Lewis. “We’re first come, first served.” He said no one from Woodland Memorial Hospital had called the shelter in advance. He also noted that Lewis had not undergone a tuberculosis test, a requirement for admission to the shelter, nor would his achy legs be able to navigate the building’s staircase to its dorm room.
With no identification, no phone and no family he could call, Lewis wandered the mission’s campus until late that night, when he sat in its “warming center” for a few hours, he said. In the morning, with the help of a sympathetic stranger, he made his way to Loaves & Fishes homeless services complex on North C Street, where staffers went to work to find him a board and care home.
He is safe now, having found a place to live in the Valley Hi neighborhood, he said. But he is baffled about the circumstances surrounding his discharge from the Woodland hospital, operated by Dignity Health.
“I was outside with this big, huge crowd of homeless people,” Lewis, tall and thin with expressive blue eyes and a missing-tooth smile, recalled on a recent afternoon. “It was a scary thing for someone my age. I didn’t know what to do. Why would they send me there when they didn’t even have a
“I was outside with this big, huge crowd of homeless people. It was a scary thing for someone my age. I didn’t know what to do. Why would they send me there when they didn’t even have a bed for me?” ARLAN LEWIS, PSYCHIATRIC PATIENT DUMPED AT HOMELESS SHELTER
bed for me?”
Robin Oliver, vice president of communications for Dignity Health, declined to address Lewis’ case specifically. She issued a statement saying that Dignity is “committed to providing the basic needs of any patient identified as homeless.”
Lewis’ situation is hardly uncommon, said administrators of shelters and other nonprofit groups that serve homeless clients. They refer to the behavior as the “dumping” of patients who are poor or homeless, and said it is occurring with increasing frequency as the Sacramento region’s homelessness crisis deepens.
Local hospitals face a common dilemma as they cope with a growing number of homeless patients. Where do they send people who have no permanent address when they are ready to be released from care? Shelters can be an acceptable option, but only if prior arrangements are made for lodging and care, health specialists said. In many cases, shelter plans are never made or fall by the wayside, administrators and others said.
“Unfortunately, it happens all the time,” said George Kohrummel, assistant director of Friendship Park, the primary gathering place at Loaves & Fishes, which serves meals and provides a variety of other services to some 700 homeless men and women each weekday. At least once a week, a medical transport van, taxi, Lyft or Uber will drop off a newly discharged hospital patient to the complex, he said.
Sometimes, the patients are still in their hospital gowns and slippers, he said. Some are dropped off after Loaves has closed for the day, and arrive without needed wheelchairs, canes and prescriptions. Many are too frail to navigate the streets.
Loaves has no overnight beds, Kohrummel said. “If I see something like this happening, I’ll have the ambulance or the taxi take them right back to the hospital.” He is unsure what happens to them after that, he said.
Joan Burke, advocacy director for Loaves, said the system for serving an estimated 2,000 homeless people in Sacramento County “is over-saturated. But hospitals have a moral and legal duty to discharge people to a suitable place.”
Brian Jensen, regional vice president of the Hospital Council of Northern and Central California, agreed. But if some people fall through the cracks, “it’s not for a lack of good intentions or effort,” he said.
California’s Health and Safety Code requires hospitals to have a discharge policy for all patients, including those who are homeless. Hospitals must make prior arrangements for patients, either with family, at a care home, or at another appropriate agency, the code says. But the task is easier said than done for health professionals dealing with people who have no place to live and may have mental illnesses and other complicated problems, said Jan EmersonShea, vice president of external affairs for the California Hospital Association.
“Hospitals try to do a ‘warm hand-off ’ if possible,” Emerson-Shea said. “But if the person is homeless, who do the hospitals call? There are only so many shelter beds. It’s a huge problem in California.”
Sometimes, homeless patients insist on being taken to specific shelters or agencies, or simply released to the streets, she said. In some communities, such as Los Angeles, patients are sometimes dropped off on skid row “because that is, in fact, where the services exist in that area for homeless people.”