Featuring Amy Turk, LCSW, Chief Executive Officer of the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), the only organization in Los Angeles focused exclusively on serving and empowering women experiencing homelessness.
What special challenges do people without permanent housing face with coronavirus? And what programs have served to protect them during the pandemic? How has the expansion of Medi-Cal under the Affordable Care Act impacted healthcare access for women experiencing homelessness? Amy Turk, a social worker and chief executive officer of the Downtown Women’s Center, and host Brenda Gazzar discuss the various public policies that have positively affected the lives of Angelenos living on the streets.
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Amy Turk, Downtown Women’s Center (courtesy of Amy Turk)
Coronavirus & Skid Row
—– TRANSCRIPT —–
Opening MUSIC – “Talk Back” 10 seconds, fade down
Welcome to Code WACK!, your podcast on America’s broken healthcare system and how Medicare for All could help. I’m your host Brenda Gazzar. Today we’ll talk about the homeless on Skid Row in Los Angeles, and how they’ve fared with health care and the coronavirus pandemic.
Amy Turk is the chief executive officer of the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), the only organization in L.A. focused exclusively on serving and empowering women experiencing homelessness. She’s held leadership positions in the field of social work and homeless services since 2001.
Welcome to Code WACK!, Amy –
Turk: Thank you, Brenda.
Q: So what are the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on this population?
Turk: So you know the impacts of coronavirus on people who are experiencing homelessness obviously is just incredibly challenging. If you don’t have a place to remain safe at home, you’re more susceptible to having the virus and spreading the virus, although we haven’t seen any more community spread among homeless populations than we have from any other population yet but it’s impacted the access to services. Many services have now turned to more remote work. And for some that works because they have to travel less and they have a phone and they can call their staff person anytime, but for some that’s a huge challenge. Of course, there are people experiencing homelessness who don’t have cell phones, or don’t have a place to charge their cell phone, which is even more challenging now with public libraries closed or coffee shops not allowing people to sit inside anymore.
Q: Right, right so how do you reach those women?
Turk: So we have done a fair amount of outreach, of course, to the women that are in close proximity to our building who normally come for what we call day center services, and we are still providing those services but we’re mostly doing it outside literally in our parking lot to just keep people safe that are still inside the building who are residing in our shelter and who are residing in our permanent housing, which is a service the Downtown Women’s Center provides.
Q: So that’s interesting. You mentioned that you haven’t seen rates higher yet in the homeless community than you have in the general population. Is that surprising to you or what do you think’s going on there?
Turk: You know, we’re all learning and thankfully at least in our community, in the Skid Row community, the city and the county have supported testing so there are pop-up testing sites that people who are living homeless in the community can have access to, as well as a number of free health clinics in that community so you know we’ll see where this takes our world, and we don’t have an explanation.
Q: I believe that they converted some spaces, I don’t know if it was hotels, into shelters for homeless people. Some of your women, were they able to use those services and how’s that working out?
Turk: Yes, it’s a state-wide initiative called Project Roomkey and this is made possible through FEMA funding and Downtown Women’s Center is one of the social service providers for one of the hotels, where we are supporting 60 women. And that really has been the best intervention through this public health crisis to provide someone their own room, with their own bathroom that’s safe has kept everyone safe. And we hope that it will continue. We hope that FEMA will continue to see this as a long-term emergency and the whole community is doing everything possible to help find permanent housing for the people who have moved into hotels through this initiative.
Q: Okay, you’ve talked a little bit about health care. What percentage of the women that you work with has coverage and access to health care, would you say?
Turk: Yeah, so healthcare coverage has increased since California expanded through the ACA (Affordable Care Act) — through Medicaid expansion — significantly. Prior to the ACA, about 20% of people that we worked with had health insurance and now it’s closer to 80% or 85%. Obviously, a demonstration that policy can really make a difference. Right?
I mean, it just makes one thing easier. You know, it hasn’t fixed everything but you no longer have to go through an arduous application process to what was before actually prove that you were disabled in order to qualify for our public health benefits.
Now, you demonstrate through your income, that you income qualify for what we call Medi-Cal in California, and it’s a much easier process and you can sign up at any time so you don’t have to wait for a particular time of year for open enrollment and you can choose your primary health care provider and that becomes what we call health home and you can also change your health home if you move across town or you want a different doctor so there’s just more flexibility and more access.
Q: So the remainder of people who don’t have health insurance, what’s going on with them? Why do you think they’re not getting the coverage?
Turk: Although there’s access there’s still maybe a lack of knowledge of what’s available, or perhaps some bad experiences with services or health care and maybe a reason that people aren’t looking to go back to any healthcare setting, and you know, it’s not like there’s a ton of doctors out there who accept Medi-Cal. It’s still kind of hard to find someone who could treat especially what becomes very complex health conditions, and so we end up, typically, relying on what are called Federally Qualified Health Centers, which is kind of our free health clinic system across the nation.
Q: Thank you, Amy.
Find more Code WACK! episodes at ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV app. You can also listen to Code WACK! at heal-ca.org. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, uplifting the voices of those fighting for healthcare reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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