One of the biggest problems facing emergency departments (ED) is the frequent readmission of individuals experiencing homelessness. They present with chronic exacerbations and acute symptoms stemming from a variety of causes including respiratory, cardiac and gastrointestinal conditions, alcohol abuse, substance addiction and mental health issues. Hospitals discharge these patients back to the streets or city shelters once they are medically stable. Others tend to leave against medical advice (AMA) once the initial urgency resolves, and they start to go into withdrawals. They bounce from one emergency room to another, straining hospital resources and taxing an already overburdened healthcare system. Literature has shown that chronically homless individuals have difficulty reintegrating back into the community because they lack certain life skills. They either neve had the opportunity to acquire them in the first place, or they lost these skills due to prolonged periods of displacement. Most of these transient individuals go to hospital EDs because it is a safe and familiar environment. This proposal is for a life skills training program that can be conducted at various inner-city shelters and medical respite facilities to help the adult homeless population develop personal competence and self-sufficiency, which would hopefully translate to a decrease in hospital readmissions.
