Homeless patients leaving Illinois hospitals need better care, so they don’t end up back on the street
During a record-breaking August 2023 heatwave in the Chicago area, a homeless individual sits on Lower Wacker Drive with cold bottled water and free supplies.
Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times
Illinois urgently needs legislation to ensure safe hospital discharges for people experiencing homelessness.
A phone call to 311 for a shelter request number is not a safe discharge plan. In Chicago, emergency shelters are at or beyond capacity, so people are waiting several days and longer for shelter bed placements.
Homeless patients who are discharged from hospitals sometimes wait, on the street, for many days before a shelter bed becomes available. While waiting for a shelter bed assignment, they don’t have access to food or medicine. During cold weather months, some unsheltered people are discharged without appropriate winter wear, leaving them at great risk for hypothermia.
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When homeless patients are sick and hospitalized, many require restorative care upon discharge, ideally from a medical respite shelter program. But in Chicago, we lack medical respite shelter programs for unsheltered people who require extra time to recover from surgery, a serious illness or who may need outpatient treatment for cancer, for example.
Other states have created legislation to ensure people experiencing homelessness receive safe and appropriate discharge planning from hospitals. And some states have increased funding streams to build up medical respite programs to provide restorative care for unsheltered patients. Illinois can and should do more to keep our homeless neighbors safe and healthy.
Monica Dillon, RN, Northwest Side Homeless Outreach Volunteers
A monopoly on education
If public education were a business, the mayor wants to have a monopoly, which is against one of the bedrock principles of America. (“Mayor’s Board of Ed looks to move away from school choice toward neighborhood schools,” Dec. 13)
How can this be beneficial to students? This is like closing all the food and clothing stores, and telling everybody to shop at Walmart. This is nothing against Walmart. I love that store. But America is about having choices.
Larry Craig, Wilmette
Handing Giuliani what he deserves
It is ironic that very likely Rudy Giuliani will pay nothing … repeat nothing … of the $148 million judgment against him in his defamation case, as in all probability he will file for bankruptcy, and that judgment debt will be extinguished.
Many were dismayed by his post-judgment “doubling down” on his defamation, saying he is unrepentant and/or deranged. Maybe so, but just as likely, he is playing to the nut case far right in the hope, and with the expectation, that he’ll get some kind of media assignment, much as Alex Jones did after his awful comments about Sandy Hook.
Accordingly, one wonders what has actually been accomplished by the civil litigation against him. Rudy’s only real comeuppance would be conviction on criminal charges.
William P. Gottschalk, Lake Forest