It’s a day like any other for the new Raven Song Primary Care Outreach Team.  Although the team starts from an office at Raven Song, work takes place off-site, at supported housing developments and homeless shelters that are scattered across the northeast quadrant of the city.

Primary Care Outreach began a number of years ago from Raven Song with a single RN and NP making weekly rounds with community partners of shelters, parks and local streets. Due to its success, a core primary care outreach team was formed last fall.

 Health care on demand

On this particular December day, two team members, Schmidt and Loveless, are visiting residents at the Marguerite Ford, an apartment complex recently opened along West 2^nd Avenue by the City of Vancouver for the hard to house.  The goal?  To spread word that health care is routinely available to residents weekly, and right where they live.

“Instead of you guys coming up to Raven Song or to the emergency department, we will come to you,” explains Schmidt to the 15 or so residents who are attending a monthly residents’ meeting. “We really want to try and help you.”

Although the team works primarily off-site, members can tap into a variety of clinical expertise that is available at Raven Song, including addictions specialists, psychiatrists and family doctors.

Connecting one client at a time

Since that first meeting at Marguerite Ford, drop-in clinic attendance has increased.  “The clients that have engaged with us are continuing to engage and our relationships with them are becoming more ‘robust,’ for lack of a better word,” said Schmidt. Eventually it is hoped that they will feel comfortable coming to the Raven Song site for all their primary care needs.

The team has also experienced a high rate of new client contact at Vancouver homeless shelters. People here are rarely connected to any services. And with shelter staff usually too busy with day-to-day operations to provide clients the clinical or life-skills support they need, the Raven Song Primary Care Outreach team has stepped in the fill the void.

“With Leslie Logan, our RN, attending to primary care needs and me, a social worker, able to meet psychosocial needs, our team has been successful at serving ever-increasing numbers of people at the shelters and on the streets,” said Schmidt. “As we continue to meet this populations’ needs, we can keep them healthy and away from our EDs, which was the place many have previously accessed their Primary Care.”

An investment in the future

Raven Song Community Health Centre manager Cathy Crozier was the driving force behind the team’s formation, and pulled together the dollars needed from existing resources to fund most of it. The team leads at Raven Song for Primary Care , Mental Health and Addictions and Home Health are continuing to work  closely together to find ways to free-up staff and actively support the core team.

“There is a growing population of people within a few block radius of Raven Song who need health care services, but who require a much more assertive outreach approach to help them get connected,” said Crozier. “It’s not a matter of if we can afford to fund this team, but rather of how we can reorganize services to free-up time and resources required to do this work together.”