National Health Care for the Homeless Council

The National Health Care for the Homeless Council provides National, state and local-level training related to the unique features and needs of Homeless populations to 300 Health centers, 150+ medical respite programs and other safety net programs that provide Care to more than one million Homeless patients per year. Program services include: virtual trainings, and a National conference, plus site-specific trainings and technical assistance from peer experts in the field. The Council maintains a compreshensive website of Health Care for the homeles information and regular publications. The nhchc held its annual conference in baltimore, md in may 2023. The conference sold out with 1,023 attendees representing 50 states, 3 u.s. Territories, australia, and canada. In addition, 137 Health Care for the Homeless programs were represented and 52 individuals with lived experience of homelessness were able to attend. The annual event includes pre-conference workshops, numerous educational sessions, and learning labs. Topics include street medicine, encampments, substance use disorder, and harm reduction.the nhchc is a National training and technical assistance partner of the Health resources and services administration. In fy23, nhchc responded to nearly 200 technical assistance requests. The top three categories were medical respite, Health Care for the Homeless admin policy, and data on homelessness. In addition to responding to requests, the Council prepared and distributed nearly three dozen issue briefs, fact sheets, and reports, as well as 50 newsletters. Topics included covid-19 lessons learned among the hch community, medicaid redetermination and implications for the hch community, encampment sweeps and more.

The National institute for medical respite Care (nimrc) is a special program of the Council created to help expand and advance medical respite Care. In the past year, the Council has helped more than 65 medical respite programs get started, expand services, or improve operations through training, technical assistance, and conducting learning communities. We also provided input to several state governments that are in various stages of including medical respite as a benefit in their state medicaid plan. We were privileged to disburse more than $6m to support medical respite programs since the launch of nimrc in july 2020.