Penn Medicine’s Homeless Outreach Project forges connections
The med students who lead Penn Medicine’s Homeless Outreach Project are connecting with people experiencing homelessness and highlighting the impact of street medicine.
2 min. read
Three people in West Philadelphia are never far from the hearts and minds of the Perelman School of Medicine students who lead the Homeless Outreach Project (HOP). Danny, Victor, and a woman who goes by T make their beds with cardboard and blankets in the tenuous shelter of an overhang near the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Several times a month, one or more students from HOP at the Perelman School of Medicine visit an overhang. Sometimes they are on a scheduled biweekly HOP outreach walk, accompanied by a family medicine physician. Other times they’re on their way home from the hospital.
HOP faculty advisor Zachary Kosak talks with Danny about his symptoms.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn Medicine News)
The individuals the students approach may request a certain necessity or comfort item—more water; a pair of boots; size X-large hoodies. They may talk about their day. After months of visits from the students, the individuals have also trusted them enough to share their medical concerns.
An unspoken need, intuitively understood by these future doctors: to be seen as human beings.
Begun in the 1990s by Jim Withers, an internal medicine physician at Pittsburgh Mercy, the practice of street medicine has evolved to mean providing primary care directly to those living and sleeping on the streets—without the expectation that they must come into a traditional medical office or even a community-based clinic for future treatment.
Street medicine is a developing specialty; Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health’s street medicine team began seeing patients in 2022. The 25-30 volunteers who make up HOP are doing their part to enhance awareness, among their peers in the medical community and beyond, of the impact this type of health care can have.
HOP’s regular activities include biweekly street rounds in Center City, University City, and West Philadelphia, on which the team offers toiletries, wound care kits, and other items, and the goal is “to try to make relationships with neighbors who are unhoused right now, and ensure that they’re doing well, in whatever way that means for them,” says Setareh Gooshvar, a third-year Penn Med student and HOP’s director of outreach. “If at some point they say, ‘Hey, I would also like to talk to you about my medical problems,’ we have the experience and knowledge to address that.”
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