Mobile clinic could provide homeless with health care

By Jaime Wilson-Chiru

Daily Bruin Contributor

UCLA Public Health students David Peng, Koy Parada and Kevin
Riley are planning on making house calls to people who don’t
actually have a place to live.

These students are in the process of creating a mobile clinic to
provide health care for people in dire need of basic medical
attention: the homeless.

“Getting health care is a huge problem for the homeless.
They themselves feel unwelcome to primary care facilities. They
wait for a problem to become far too severe, something that could
have been prevented,” Peng said.

Instead of waiting for the homeless to seek medical assistance,
Peng and his group will drive to a site in West Hollywood and seek
them out.

“As far as we know, no one has ever brought health care to
a place of food distribution,” Peng said.

The idea for the mobile clinic began with the Greater West
Hollywood Food Coalition, a group that provides food for West
Hollywood’s homeless community.

The food coalition, which distributes food on the corner of
Sycamore and Romaine, has been helping the homeless for 13
years.

The coalition wanted to draw from UCLA’s resources to
further assist the people they service. They first contacted
Michael Prelip, a field studies supervisor in the department of
Community Health Sciences at UCLA.

“They weren’t sure they were doing all they could be
doing for the homeless. So they invited me out to see what was
happening,” Prelip said.

Prelip and a few public health students went to the site in the
winter and discovered that many people that came for the food were
troubled by a variety of health problems.

“We went to see these people and spoke with them,
realizing that they were not getting the benefit of certain rights
we take for granted,” Peng said.

“Living in the streets is a very easy way to develop a
medical problem,” said Ted Landreth, a founding member of the
food coalition. “We really have an ability to bridge the gap
between us, the people we serve, and the UCLA community,” he
said, referring to the project.

Initially, medical students supervised by a licensed physician
will only treat acute illnesses.

“We’re going to start with some of the easier
things. But we intend to be a full-fledged primary care
service,” Peng said.

Peng, a graduate of UC San Diego Medical School, has experience
in serving the homeless. While in medical school, he and the other
students set up a clinic for the homeless in a church in 1995.

Because they have no budget yet, the students will initially
rent a van to take supplies to the site. There, they will set up
tents for the medical students to diagnose and treat patients.

“We’ll have to bring a tarp, battery-operated lights
and use lawn chairs as exam tables,” Parada said.

Currently, those involved in the project are writing grants and
asking pharmaceutical companies for donations of medical supplies.
Parada hopes that the project, which is slated to begin Aug. 28,
will have received more support by then.

“We would be able to purchase better quality
medications,” Parada said. “We’d be able to
provide more.”

Besides the medical school and the school of public health,
other departments have become interested in the project. The law
school is helping West Hollywood’s homeless with certain
legal needs, and Peng says that the school of dentistry and social
welfare will become involved as well.

“We’re hoping this area will be an area in which the
entire university will pull together to help this group of
people,” Peng said. “We can treat them with the respect
and dignity everyone deserves.”