Street Nursing: Teaching and Improving Community Health.

Abstract

Living on the streets continues to be a traumatic and dangerous lifestyle that creates many challenges in society, especially challenges related to community health and health care. In San Antonio, Texas, half of the unhoused population is Hispanic, aligning with national reports that document how Hispanics/Latinxs are overrepresented in the unhoused communities. Street Medicine™ programs are surfacing nationwide and around the world, frequently as medical schools' initiatives, to provide medical care to unhoused populations, providing a unique learning opportunity for medical students and other health care disciplines, including Nursing. UT Health Street Nursing organization was formed in the context of a clinical rotation experience for the Population-Focused Health course while supporting and collaborating with Street Medicine SA. This initiative exposes nursing students to the reality of not having a place to live and the struggles vulnerable populations face to access and navigate health care services, discovering how Latinos generally have less access to quality health care and suffer from poor health.