QuickTake:

Everyone Village and PeaceHealth both saw a need to help people recover after hospital visits – and stay off the streets. The Eugene homeless shelter now has recuperation cottages for people when they exit the hospital.

A Eugene homeless shelter and PeaceHealth have joined forces to help unsheltered people stay off the streets and continue to recover after they leave the hospital. 

Everyone Village, a Eugene transitional shelter program at 3825 Janisse St., has 10 new cottages that opened in June. The tiny homes, also called “recuperation cottages,” are a partnership between Everyone Village and PeaceHealth, the region’s largest health care provider and operator of Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend in Springfield. 

The tiny homes represent a different way of bringing medical care and health services to people who are homeless after they leave the hospital. Now, PeaceHealth staff can send people without shelter to one of the recuperation cottages after they are treated at the hospital and ready to leave.

When people no longer need to stay in a hospital, they still require follow-up care and recuperation services to make a full recovery and improve their health. The recuperation cottages provide a place for that to happen — away from the health risks people face when they are homeless. Those risks are myriad, and include a lack of nutritious food, sleeping outdoors, developing infections and exposure to illicit drugs.

As a result, the recuperation cottages aid a person’s recovery, making them less likely to return to a hospital emergency room. 

People who live in the recuperation cottages are no longer hospital patients. PeaceHealth frequently has had patients who leave the hospital without a safe place to go, often because they lack stable housing, said Susan Blane, community health director for PeaceHealth in Oregon. 

“When a patient leaves the hospital or the emergency room in that situation, their best situation for a successful recovery is to go someplace where they have a support system, there’s people around them, and they have a stable, warm shelter where they can rest and recuperate safely,” Blane said in an interview with Lookout Eugene-Springfield. “That’s the population that we’re talking about when we’re talking about who we would foresee coming into the recuperation cottages when they leave the hospital.”

The medical situations can run the gamut: recovery from surgeries, an injury or a chronic condition that worsened.

How it works

The recuperation cottages are simple: They have a single bed and a minifridge for medicine and food. A contract with PeaceHealth covers the operational costs, including two staffers assigned to work with clients in the recuperation cottages.

While people stay there, they get three meals a day. Positive Community Kitchen provides the dinners, with a focus on healthy, organic and nutritious foods that promote healing, Blane said. 

The 10 recuperation cottages are part of a broader community of up to 70 additional residents who are part of Everyone Village. Residents who are recovering after hospital stays can access other areas of Everyone Village, including the laundry facility and case manager and housing navigators who can help them seek out opportunities for the future. 

“While they are here, they can start to see: ‘What options do I have to avert going back to the street once my recovery time is done?’” said Gabe Piechowicz, executive director of Everyone Village. 

The stays in recuperation cottages are not permanent and the lengths are based on each patient’s individual needs. 

The work comes as emergency room visits at PeaceHealth’s hospital in Springfield have increased with long wait times. Hospital leaders say the recuperation cottages will help address that and will benefit the community. 

“When we can position people to get excellent, safe recuperation in another setting, that hospital and emergency room isn’t congested with people who really, ideally should be at home getting better, then that reduces wait times in the emergency room,” said Blane, with PeaceHealth. “It opens up beds in the hospital for acutely ill people, and it lowers our cost of health care for everyone.”

Clinic plans take shape 

More work is ahead at Everyone Village to enhance care for people in the recuperation cottages and beyond. 

Volunteers in Medicine Clinic plans to establish a presence at Everyone Village starting in September. The nonprofit, based in Springfield, provides free medical care with volunteer medical staff, including nurses and doctors.

The volunteer group will start at least one day a week and serve all the residents at Everyone Village, regardless of whether they are in the recuperation program. The number of days the clinic will be on site each week depends on the needs. The volunteers on any given day most likely would be a nurse and a doctor, said DeLeesa Meashintubby, executive director of Volunteers in Medicine Clinic. 

The increased access, Meashintubby said, can help more people avoid emergency rooms and urgent care clinics. People can struggle to access doctors, even for routine needs, without long waits and it’s important for the clinic to reach people. 

“What we’re doing is just going out there to just take care of patients,” Meashintubby said. “It’s not about us billing and getting lots of money out of it, but it’s about us getting out of the four walls of the building and being able to take care of patients. That’s what we want to do — just take care of our community.”

The on-site clinic can also give residents at the village a chance to develop skills necessary to be a receptionist, which can help them obtain future jobs. 

Piechowicz said that access will benefit the village community greatly and enhance their ability to see a primary care physician. For those who are recuperating, he said, it helps them stay on the right track. 

“If recovery starts going the wrong way, they’re a mere set of steps away from seeing a doctor on site,” he said. “That’s massive.”

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Ben Botkin covers politics and policy in Lane County. He has worked as a journalist since 2003, most recently at the Oregon Capital Chronicle, where he covered justice, health and human services and documented regional efforts to combat fentanyl addiction. Botkin has worked in statehouses in Idaho, Nevada, Oklahoma and, of course, Oregon. When he's not working, you'll find him road tripping across the West, hiking or surfing along the Oregon Coast.