Some Hospitals Deal with Poor Patients by ‘Dumping’ at Homeless Shelters

I recently visited a local homeless shelter on assignment for a feature story I was writing for a local magazine. I spent several hours there learning what all the shelter offers to individuals going through tough times.

While talking to a couple of the case managers at the shelter, I learned about a troubling trend that is happening across the country called homeless dumping, where workers at a hospital or psychiatric institution “dump” the person on the side of the road, or if the patient is lucky, at a shelter. The case managers at the shelter I was visiting were talking about a woman who had been institutionalized due to a mental illness since the 1970s. One day a few weeks ago, a van drove up to the shelter, dropper her off and drove away. The case managers knew nothing about her except the little information she carried with her. She was unable to communicate much to them.

Since the 1980s, when there was a big push to deinstitutionalize individuals and instead send them to community mental health centers, people with mental disorders who are unable to care for themselves have slipped through the cracks and wind up like the woman dumped off at the homeless shelter. The effort to try and reintegrate individuals into the community is admirable, but for some people, it’s not an option.

At its worst, homeless dumping consists of hospital workers dropping off people on the street. In 2007 it was reported that a hospital van in Los Angeles dropped off a paraplegic man on the notorious Skid Row. This case was preceded by others in the LA area.

More recently, a shelter in San Antonio has encountered several patients, many still in their hospital gowns, dropped off at the site. Most, though, are too ill to be taken care of at the shelter. The hospitals argue that the patients have stayed the required amount of time for the illness and are discharged. Staying past that time decreases the revenue stream, the hospitals say.

For the woman at the local shelter I visited, her future is in question. Like many of the patients dumped, she can’t perform daily tasks on her own—something that should have kept her in the hospital—and the shelter is not equipped to handle her. One of the requirements of staying in the shelter is being able to take care of yourself. If the shelter and hospital can’t figure out a solution, she could end up on the streets.

Kristi Eaton is a staff writer for Campus Progress. She graduated from Arizone State University in 2008.