Investing in Our Members

One of the main goals of AbsoluteCare is to reduce a member’s need to visit the emergency room. Job and food insecurity, along with housing instability, are among the main reasons for these ER visits, as homelessness and health issues are often strongly connected. That’s where our Member Fund can make a dramatic difference.

Mr. W is a member of our Philadelphia center. He struggles with homelessness and health, and was, like so many others in this country, using the hospital as shelter. By late October, he had visited the ER 29 times.

On October 26, his AbsoluteCare case worker helped find housing and used the Member Fund to purchase household needs: a bed, cleaning and personal hygiene items, and food. Helping Mr. W with housing and providing solutions to food insecurity was a great step in the right direction.

When Mr. W’s case worker visited him in his new rented room, Mr. W cried. In his 10 years of living on the street, he said, no one had ever helped him like this. He was very excited to be able to take a shower and make use of personal hygiene items, a simple task that most of us take for granted.

By using our Member Fund to help Mr. W find solutions to food insecurity and address housing instability, we were able to reduce his hospital ER visits from 29 in October, down to 4 in November. #beyondmedicine