Sacramento hospital caught 'dumping' seniors at homeless shelters with no plan and sometimes no clothes

The Sacramento Bee has exposed Woodland Memorial Hospital, operated by Dignity Health, for allegedly kicking seniors out of their beds and depositing them on the steps of homeless shelters.

Arlan Lewis was one such person, who had been hospitalized and under psychiatric evaluation for a week at Woodland, and when a taxi dropped him off at a shelter 20 miles away, he told the paper he was disoriented and in pain from arthritis. The 78-year-old former cook recently became homeless when rent prices in the city surpassed his Social Security checks.

The hospital told him to tell the shelter he had a reservation, but with only 60 beds, Lewis was forced to sleep on the street outside with many others.

“It doesn’t work that way here,” shift supervisor Bobby Chatman told Lewis. “We’re first come, first served.” No one from the hospital had called the shelter ahead of time. Lewis also hasn't had a tuberculosis text, which is required for someone to be admitted to their shelter. His arthritic leg wouldn't be able to handle the stairs to the dorm rooms anyway.

“I was outside with this big, huge crowd of homeless people,” Lewis told the Bee. “It was a scary thing for someone my age. I didn’t know what to do. Why would they send me there when they didn’t even have a bed for me?”

Lewis had no family, no phone and not even an identification, and spent the night wandering around, until the "warming center" let him come inside for a few hours. Thanks to a stranger, he made his way to Loaves & Fishes homeless services complex, where staff tried to find him a home. He's safe today, but still wondering how Woodland shoved him out only to drop him on the door of a shelter that couldn't accommodate him.

When Lewis was picked up by police, he was looking for help after having been mugged and having his belongings stolen. The police took him to one local hospital, which shipped him to Woodland. After a week, he was told "his ride" was waiting outside. He wanted to leave, but he was never told where he was going.

The same happened to a homeless, mentally ill woman, according to Michele Steeb, CEO at St. John’s Program for Real Change.

“I approached the cab driver, and I asked, ‘Who ordered her here?’ ” Steeb said. “He showed me paperwork from the Stanislaus County Department of Behavioral Health.”

Steeb sent an email to Sacramento County health authorities. The subject line read, “Dept of Behavioral Health of Stan Cty dumped one of their clients on our doorstep today ... ” The administrators at Sacramento County claimed they'd investigate what happened.

“It was a horrifying situation,” Steeb said. “This is not how we should be treating human beings.”

Kohrummel recalled a medical transport van that pulled into the Loaves campus with an elderly homeless woman. She had only one leg, but “she had no wheelchair, no walker, no prosthetic. Yet she said the hospital instructed them to bring her here, and they were putting her out on the sidewalk.”

“I told the driver to turn around and return her to the hospital,” Kohrummel said. The driver couldn't remember. “There are so many of these situations,” he said. “I lose track.”

Local hospitals are coming under pressure as there seems to be an increase in homeless patients seeking help. According to George Kohrummel, who helps provide meals to Loaves & Fishes, this happens "all the time." The term often used to describe the practice from hospitals is "dumping." Some are even still in their hospital gowns and slippers when they're kicked back out to the streets.

“If I see something like this happening, I’ll have the ambulance or the taxi take them right back to the hospital,” Kohrummel said.

Loaves advocacy director Joan Burke said that the system serving the homeless in the county “is over-saturated. But hospitals have a moral and legal duty to discharge people to a suitable place.”

Yet, California's Health and Safety Code mandates that hospitals have a "discharge policy" for any homeless people. Los Angeles county hospitals are currently being sued for "dumping" homeless patients on the streets without a plan. In 2016, a Hawaiian Gardens hospital was forced to settle a suit for $450,000 after sending a woman to skid row wearing only paper clothing and without identification.

By contrast, Sutter Health, another local hospital, is the leader in helping homeless people move on from their stay. Staffers there create “transition of care” plans that could include respite care from shelters or substance abuse treatment.

“The goal is to give them that warm hand-off instead of putting them in taxis,” the hospitals vice president of external affairs, Keri Thomas told the paper. “It’s something our hospitals take very seriously.”

The hospitals named all claimed that they aim to best serve all patients and find solutions. None would address specifically what went wrong in the cases cited.

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