Mobile Clinic Project helps homeless of L.A.
By Neha Jaganathan
June 6, 2010 10:42 p.m.
Eleven years ago, a group of UCLA students leased a van for $86 a month and parked it in West Hollywood once a week.
They met with three or four of Los Angeles’ homeless residents to offer basic medical services, free of charge. Today, what began as a modest undertaking is now a thriving service.
“It was almost on a doctor-with-a-black-bag level,” said Koy Parada, a lecturer at the UCLA School of Public Health and an adviser to the Mobile Clinic Project.
The initial stages of UCLA’s Mobile Clinic Project started in 1999, when Parada was approached by the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition about providing medical services for the homeless population, she said.
Mobile Clinic operates every Wednesday and Saturday in three locations in Los Angeles County. The Wednesday clinic is at the corner of Romaine Street and North Sycamore Avenue in West Hollywood and starts around 6:30 p.m.
The West Hollywood clinic operates out of a truck that has all of the necessary medical equipment and sets up chairs outside. It provides dental services and recently applied for grants to provide eye glasses.
Other clinics operated through the project are open on Saturday mornings. Step Up on Second in Santa Monica is a mental health clinic that functions as a free health clinic every second and fourth Saturday. Clients can also go to the Ocean Park Community Center, which serves as a free health clinic every first and third Saturday. The clinics average 30 clients a night.
The clinic is run by undergraduate, medical, public health and law students, said Diana Nguyen, a third-year psychobiology student.
Undergraduate students act as caseworkers and try to figure out why clients have come to the clinic, while medical students provide actual services and prescribe any necessary medication, Nguyen said.
She added that law students help clients with some of their legal needs, because some homeless people receive tickets and have outstanding fines for loitering.
Public health students are responsible for educating clients on general health issues, and more recently, for collecting data about the clients who use Mobile Clinic, said Najib Ussef, a fifth-year psychobiology student and one of four undergraduate coordinators for the program.
This data can then be used to discover statistical trends among the client population, he said.
Ussef, who is now completing his second year in the program, said he was motivated to join because he thought he could identify with the homeless as an underserved community.
“Growing up, (I) had to rely on free clinics for health care,” Ussef said. “My family was fairly uninsured.”
Many undergraduate students who take part in the project said the experience dispelled myths and assumptions they had about the homeless population.
“Getting to know (the homeless) as people and clients was very humbling,” said Christopher Bartlett, a fourth-year molecular, cell and developmental biology student.
It’s not every day that a college student becomes friends with a homeless man. But after spending hours with him over many visits, Bartlett formed a connection with his first client. He knew his client only by his street name, Suicide, but he said he saw a visible change in the man’s sobriety as he continued to visit the clinic.
“At the end we were trying to convince him to go to a program that could help him. … He finally decided to go,” Bartlett said.
Suicide called Bartlett himself with a coworker’s phone to tell him he had decided to enroll in the program.
Bartlett said he had not been exposed to a homeless population until working with the Mobile Clinic.
“A lot of them are just looking for someone to talk to. … If you’re out on the streets, you’re not able to make the same connections,” said Christine Thang, a third-year physiological science student.
In addition to fulfilling a requirement of volunteer hours, undergraduate students who participate in the project are also required to take or audit a two-quarter-long public health class taught by Parada.
Funding for the Mobile Clinic comes from grants both within and outside UCLA, Parada said.
