by Stacey Burling for
Philly.com – Inquirer/Daily News
On the afternoon of June 12, an ambulance sent by Temple University Hospital’s Episcopal Campus pulled up to Station House, a shelter for homeless men, with the kind of passenger Michael Hinson has come to dread.
Hinson noticed a disturbing pattern soon after he became president of SELF Inc., the organization that runs Station House and six other shelters, a year ago. Some hospitals seemed to be trying to circumvent city rules by sending Station House weak and sick patients after 4 p.m., when a City of Philadelphia office that decides if people are well enough for shelters closes for the day. By ambulance, cab, and Uber, people would go from hospitals to Station House, which provides nighttime shelter intake for single men.
As a result, Hinson trained his staff to rush out and meet vehicles before they could deliver people to the shelter’s parking lot off North Broad Street.
That June afternoon, the passenger was a paraplegic man in a wheelchair. He was too weak to maneuver the chair himself or transfer to a toilet. He needed multiple medications. For liability reasons, shelters are not supposed to take people who need hands-on care and cannot do for themselves what doctors call activities of daily living, like dressing and using a bathroom. Hinson said the city had told Episcopal the day before that the man was not appropriate for a shelter and needed to be in a nursing home.
A Station House intake officer sent the man back to the hospital.
Three hours later, at 6:45 p.m., Hinson himself was outside when the man returned, this time in a cab, along with a collapsible commode, a urinal, and three bags of clothes.
Episcopal had paid the cabdriver with a one-way voucher, and he refused to take the patient back to the hospital, Hinson said. Trapped between the rules and his desire to protect the man’s dignity, Hinson let him stay in the shelter overnight. The city took him back to the hospital the next day.
“He’s done nothing to deserve the broken system that we have or that the hospital has or the city has,” Hinson said of his overnight guest.
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