ST. ALBANS, Vt. (WCAX) – A new pilot program at Northwestern Medical Center provides short-term units to patients struggling to find safe housing when they leave the hospital. Now, the hospital says they’re hoping to expand the program to more patients in need.
“I was worried,” said Jessica Smith of St. Albans. “Like OK, if they’re going to let me go home, where am I going?”
Smith and her family live in St. Albans, but back in January, their world turned upside down.
“All I heard was people yelling, chainsaws, first responders yelling,” she said.
A large tree fell during a wind storm, decimating her home.
Smith says during that incident she was left with severe injuries.
After months in the hospital, three surgeries and no home to return to, a program at Northwestern Medical Center gave Smith a roof over her head.
“It’s really hard for them to focus on their medical need because their first priority is where am I going to sleep tonight? So with this program, we’re able to give them that,” said Erin Davis, the case manager for the hospital’s Medical Respite Care Program.
The program started through a $200,000 state grant and offers 30-day stays at two apartment buildings in St. Albans at no cost to patients. One is on North Elm Street, the other is on Sheldon Road.
“We try to make it feel like a home as much as we can and try to make it accessible for everybody that comes in to use these units,” Davis said.
Each apartment is fully furnished and comes with things like food assistance, connections to in-home health and primary care providers, and counseling services if needed.
“Those resources are available to everyone in the community if you have a place and you have to have a phone and you probably have to have internet. It’s not a luxury anymore to have a cellphone. It’s a necessity. People need these things so when they’re in that unit, they have access to all of the things that they need,” said Amanda Wilson of Northwestern Medical Center.
As the cost of health care continues to rise in Vermont, program managers say this can be a model for change in the future.
“When you connect housing to health, you can’t have one and not the other. We’ve got to do health care differently. What we were doing doesn’t work anymore. We have to change to get better in different outcomes and I think this is a way that we can do that,” Wilson said.
Since its inception, the program has served seven patients. The hospital says they hope to grow the program in the future with help from more state funding.