Christopher Peak Photo
Yezenia Lebron: Ready to help other women off the streets.
While she was living on the street, Yezenia Lebron dropped into hospital emergency rooms about every two months.
After using drugs consistently, she’d wasted away to 94 pounds, She needed help dealing with bacterial infections, substance use disorder and suicidal thoughts.
Once, while being treated for a potentially fatal bug that was poisoning her blood, Lebron ran out of the Hospital of St. Raphael and stood on Chapel Street, shivering in the rain.
“I was already almost dead. People didn’t think I was going to make it. To be honest, I didn’t think I was going to make it,” Lebron said. “I was tired of fighting the fight.”
Lebron now helps other women recover from their addictions with the nonprofit homeless-housing organization New Reach. She shared those details about her many hospital check-ins during a press conference on Thursday morning.
New Reach and Yale-New Haven Hospital held the press conference announced a new partnership, tentatively known as the Integrated Care Project, aimed at 130 women who find themselves in the situation Lebron was once in.
Funded by a five-year, $2.48 million grant from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the project aims to help homeless women struggling with both mental health and substance use disorders who have been showing up in the emergency room more than once a month, including one woman who’s been in more than 100 times in a year.
The initiative will test out how follow-up care can help this group of women with “co-occurring conditions” to treat their addiction and move into their own place.
New Reach’s Kellyann Day.
New Reach currently offers rental assistance, emergency shelter beds and permanent supportive housing. Kellyann Day, the nonprofit’s executive director, said that this grant will allow New Reach to bring together a team of specialists that it never had before “to save hospital resources, save taxpayer dollars, and most important, save lives.”
The Integrated Care Project will be implementing a rapid-response model known as the “Critical Time Intervention,” which was developed five years ago at Hunter College’s Silberman School of Social Work in New York City.
After an emergency room visit, a team of behavioral health specialists and social workers will connect patients to community-based agencies like New Reach. After being trained in how to recognize and respond to trauma, the team will help the women stabilize their mental health, talk about their family, look into insurance and motivate themselves.
YNHH’s Gail D’Onofrio.
Gail D’Ononfrio, the hospital’s physician-in-chief of emergency services, said that could mean flipping some traditional interview questions on their head.
For instance, team members will ask patients with substance use disorder to rate, on a scale from 1 to 10, how ready they are to enter treatment. If a patient says 4, they won’t ask the expected follow-up: What’s holding them back from a higher score? Instead, D’Onofrio said, they’ll ask the patient to talk about why she wouldn’t have rated themselves lower, to speak about what’s already motivating them. Then, she said, they can ask the patient what has to happen to begin treatment.
Lebron, who’s now a peer recovery specialist at New Reach after a social worker at St. Raphael’s connected her with the organization, will be helping to make sure the services fit what each woman needs.
She said that she knows that individualized approach can work, as it did for her. She said that she’ll be able to connect with women about what it’s like to hide clothes in a bush and hope they’re still there, to feel so scared and not be able to show it.
With the services this grant will enable, offering help with all the paperwork needed to see a mental-health provider and the waiting list for housing, “I would have gotten myself together a long time ago,” Lebron said.
The team chose to focus on homeless women in particular because they’re at higher risk, while having fewer services available.
“There’s been a lack of awareness that women are struggling with homelessness nationally,” Day said. “They’re vulnerable. They’re more likely to have their own trauma from sexual assault and domestic violence.”
D’Onofrio said that some homeless women also avoid seeking treatment because they fear that child-protective services will take away their kids.
Day said that New Reach and Yale-New Haven Hospital still have to trouble-shoot how they’ll plan to house 130 women over the next five years, given the region’s shortage of affordable places.
The model will be evaluated by the Bassuk Center for Social Innovation in Boston. Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz and other state officials said they hope to eventually see the results replicated across the country.
Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz.