Data
While understanding the importance of individual stories, DWW is keenly aware of the substance of data and statistics. During each patient encounter a scribe records patient demographic info such as age and time spent homeless in addition to their medical history. In order to provide the community with transparent information regarding our organization we have aggregated this data below. We also understand the importance of comparing this data, openly, with that of others in Santa Barbara and around the world. Refer to our articles page as well as the Common Ground SB website for info on what others are doing to solve this problems and what this data might mean for our friends and neighbors without homes. We will continue to update this data as it becomes available. The following data was collected from January 1st to May 31st of 2011.Doctors on our street teams and in the women's clinic have encountered roughly 490 patients since the beginning of 2011. 290 of these were at one of the street clinics, either Alemeda, Pershing or Isla Vista and many more were from the bi-monthly Women's Free Health Clinic (WFHC). Patients seen by the street teams were 79% male and 21% female, and the women's clinic sees about 20-25 patients per week which accounts for roughly 200 women seen out of the 10 clinics this year. By the end of this year we project that we will serve roughly 1,296 individuals.
The chart to the right shows the medical conditions seen by our doctors as a percentage of the total number of patients. The most common ailment is some sort of respiratory problem such as asthma or COPD which makes up 25% of our patients encounters. Other common complaints are skin (18%), infection (16%), muscles (12%), wounds (11%), and other miscellaneous pain (7%). The rest of our patients experience a range of other problems affecting teeth, cardiac, ears, and pregnancy.
When taking a patients history we ask for the length of their current episode of homelessness. This is a very important statistic that illustrates whether the individual has been chronically homeless for a long period of time or if they have recently moved to the streets. Nearly 50% of our patients have been on the streets one year or less. But nearly a quarter have been homeless for more than 20 years and many more are unable to say exactly how many years it has been.
Lastly is the age of patients that we encounter. Nearly half of our patients are over 50 but we see patients of all age ranges.
We understand the importance of data in assessing the need of underserved populations in our community and will continue to improve our data collection and presentation in the future. If you would like to find out more about us or have ANY suggestion for how we could better present these data to the public please contact us.
