Dr Jim Withers and a medical resident examining a patient on ‘street rounds’ in Pittsburgh, PA. Photo: Pittsburgh Mercy Health System
Dr Jim Withers and a medical resident examining a patient on ‘street rounds’ in Pittsburgh, PA. Photo: Pittsburgh Mercy Health System

USA Today’s House calls for the homeless: Street docs find no quick fix profiles Street Medicine Detroit – a program involving about 100 Wayne State medical students who visit patients in the homeless shelters, parks and underpasses where they live.

Also featured in the article is ACU Member Jim Withers.  Withers, a pioneer in taking health care to the streets to reach the chronically homeless, began his nightly excursions to meet the homeless on their own turf in 1992. He calls his approach “reality-based health care.” Read about “Grandpa,” an elderly homeless man whom Withers met early in his street medicine career, in Street Medicine: An Example of Reality-based Health Care, a column Withers wrote for ACU and published in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved.