Las Vegas’ unhoused population has new, but familiar, venue to receive medical care
Emergency room nurse Chrisy Etheridge estimates that “probably 50% of the patient population” she sees during an overnight shift at Desert Springs Medical Center are people living without permanent housing.
Some may have a serious health issue requiring immediate care, while others are simply looking for a way to get a meal and socks on their feet, she said.
Wanting to do more for this group of residents, whom she said were generally disregarded in typical medical settings, Etheridge was drawn to working at the Las Vegas Rescue Mission Neighborhood Clinic, a new on-site medical facility in the downtown area for unhoused people.
“The biggest piece with a lot of this demographic is that they don’t trust the medical community anymore,” Etheridge said. “Here, you get the opportunity where they get to see us as humans also, and we’re just people (who) want to provide the best care for them.”
She now cares for people like Jorge Colon, who spent the last seven months at the mission battling alcoholism. Colon, who was experiencing back and kidney pain, was able to get the appropriate medical tests and treatment at the clinic, and more importantly, graduate from its addiction recovery program, which has about 78 people enrolled.
“It’s a great idea to open a clinic here so people don’t have to go through the same situations and the same problems that I went through when I was in recovery,” Colon said.
The free clinic, which opened Nov. 1, offers a number of services, including general physical wellness checkups, blood work and lab tests, X-rays, and pharmaceutical assistance to help those who need medicines. The lone specialty service it is offering, for now, is to patients in the mission’s addiction recovery program and eventually hopes to expand to others such as gynecological services. The clinic is not equipped to handle big emergencies like heart attacks.
The clinic’s staff includes Etheridge, a family nurse practitioner, Nicobye Downing, a medical technician in the pharmacy area), and several certified nursing assistants.
The clinic was born through the rescue mission’s partnership with MDX Labs, which did frequent COVID-19
testing on unhoused individuals during the pandemic, said Nicki Antill, the chief operating officer of the rescue mission.
After seeing a need for on-site health care, the mission coordinated with Dan Briggs — president and chief executive officer of MDX Labs — to create the clinic.
What started as an old former medical building with peeling walls and broken floorboards was transformed into a fully functional clinic in three weeks, said Alyson Martinez, the clinical director. Etheridge now has full command of a front desk area, waiting room, office, three exam rooms and secured medicine storage area — all snuggled within a 795 square-foot building.
Antill said “access to basic medical care is not easy for any of us” because you have to find a doctor, establish a relationship, get insurance and find the time to make and attend appointments. When homelessness and financial means are added into the equation, Antill said, it becomes even more difficult, especially for those who may still be early in their addiction recovery.
“Sometimes just leaving the (mission) campus early in their recovery (and) jumping on a bus can be a really difficult trip,” Antill said. “So, having something on-site where they can walk across the campus and see somebody in a completely safe environment is really important.”
Ricky D’andre Taylor knows firsthand how “triggering” these trips can be. He has been at the rescue mission for about a month and — as part of the addiction recovery program — was one of the initial clients to receive services at the clinic.
When he used to see his health provider, Taylor said he was “triggered by everything” because the office was surrounded by places where he used to drink and use drugs, which could “set him off.”
“It’s really easy for me to fall off because I’m impulsive,” Taylor said. “So, it’s just safer for me to have a clinic (that’s) closer because that way I can focus on my sobriety.”
The clinic offers a number of different treatment options that draw from both “Eastern and Western” medicine, Hofmocke said. Clients can stop by to see Etheridge to retrieve something as simple as an essential oils inhaler, or get bloodwork or X-rays taken. If a client needs more advanced care, they are taken to an emergency room.
There even is a secured pharmacy area for clients to pick up their prescription medicine. The medicine is carefully selected to not interfere with the existing conditions of the clients, so shelves are filled with sugar-free cough drops for diabetics and nonalcoholic cough syrup.
“As an ER provider, I would prescribe medications and be done with it, and I would have no idea what the outcome was,” Etheridge said. “And here, we get to have this conversation, and it makes me want this model in every health care setting because it’s so imperative to have all of this flow from the lab work to the imaging to the pharmaceutical.”
Etheridge said beyond the clients in the addiction recovery program, the clinic has already seen over 50 clients, but officials expect the number to grow, especially now that the rescue mission is trying to get all of their clients tested for tuberculosis.
The Las Vegas Rescue Mission also serves single adults and families with both or only one parent. Mission officials believe it’s the only shelter that provides services to single fathers and their children.
“The clinic’s been great because once we do get a nice flow, we are looking to expand all of the services to the ones in the shelter, which includes those families,” Martinez said.
There were 5,645 unhoused individuals in Southern Nevada as of February 2022, according to the Help Hope Home’s 2022 Point-in-time Count and Survey.
Etheridge, who is leaving her emergency room job to work full-time at the clinic beginning Thursday, wants to offer health services to as many of those people as possible.