Connections for the Homeless is launching a “medical respite” program to provide greater health care to residents of the Margarita Inn homeless shelter, the nonprofit housing agency announced Tuesday.
The program is funded by a $400,000 grant from the Community Investment Fund of Endeavor Health, the health system created by the 2022 merger of NorthShore University HealthSystem and Edward-Elmhurst Health. Connections is one of 43 organizations across the region receiving a grant this year from Endeavor, and one of six operating in Evanston.
In the news release announcing the grant, Connections CEO Betty Bogg wrote that the grant’s timing is “ideal” as the agency enters “a new era” following its purchase of the Margarita Inn in November 2023.
“These resources will be used to launch a medical respite program that will put the Margarita Inn at the forefront of providing medical services to unhoused people with significant needs,” Bogg wrote. “It’s critical to address housing and health care needs together, so people can return to being housed over the long-term.”
Defining medical respite
Medical respite is a form of health care specifically designed to treat people experiencing homelessness for illness or injury, and then help them recover. This care is more intensive than outpatient or nursing care, but not so intense that shelter residents require hospitalization.
In a phone call with the RoundTable, Bogg said the grant will allow Connections to expand its existing in-house medical staff and create a “formalized” medical respite pilot for the Margarita Inn. She said the inn is better positioned to provide such care as a hotel-based shelter over traditional congregate shelters since each resident has a consistent private space.
“If people have the same room [every day], we’re just able to deliver services at a different level,” Bogg said. “The combination of us obtaining the Margarita and getting this investment from our health care provider partners is what’s really going to help us launch this.”
Without housing, some treatments impossible, Bogg says
Bogg said that since homelessness and serious health issues can create and reinforce each other, many inn residents have chronic medical conditions that can only be attended to in stable housing. She said some types of health care were simply inaccessible without stable housing, describing one resident who couldn’t properly receive chemotherapy while unsheltered and another who couldn’t get on a heart transplant waiting list until he was housed.
Beyond providing immediate care and recovery, Bogg said, the program will also aim to ensure shelter residents can continue to stay healthy after they move out of the inn and into long-term housing. She said this could include matching residents with other long-term care providers and finding long-term housing accessible for specific disabilities.
“It’s not our hope to become people’s permanent medical provider, we need to find them a medical home,” Bogg said. “Building and strengthening on these relationships, like this partnership with Endeavor, with our other community partners who are health care providers, that’s what’s going to keep people OK once they move into their housing.”