Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O'Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People

Kidder describes riding in a van through South Boston with Dr. Jim O’Connell. The outreach van, which has been operating for three decades, is one tool the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program uses to help the unhoused population around the city. Kidder describes Jim’s encounter with a long-time patient who responds only when Jim calls. The program, founded in the 1980s, now employees over 400 people. Jim previously spent countless hours throughout the night with the “Street Team” caring for his patients throughout the city. Kidder joins him for his Monday-night rounds, which end around midnight.

The van carries food, blankets, socks, and underwear. When necessary and when patients acquiesce, the program offers rides to hospitals and shelters. Kidder describes how methods of treating people living on the streets of Boston have changed over the years, largely informed by the input from the people being treated. For example, the board—made up of health care practitioners and formerly unhoused people—put into policy that doctors shine flashlights into their own faces instead of those of people who are sleeping or resting in places around the city. Kidder discusses the demographic of the unhoused population in Boston. He recounts that there are half as many women as there are men and far less people of Black and Latino descent—a direct contradiction to the statistical reality that houselessness disproportionately affects communities of color.

During the van ride, Kidder encounters a woman. Jim says that she is on K2, a synthetic form of marijuana that causes its users to scratch incessantly. The woman, however, tells Jim that she has lice. Though she just bought $100 of treatments, they were stolen. Jim examines her. He does not see lice but does not argue. He says that she can ride with them to the shelter for treatment, but she declines, taking food instead. As they talk, she tells Jim her life story, including an attempted rape resulting in an injured shoulder. He examines her, tells her she can go to the Street Clinic at “Mass General,” or Massachusetts General Hospital, and writes the number down for the van should she decide to go to the shelter. The van rolls on.

Dr. O’Connell tells Kidder that when the program first began in the 1980s, the medical conditions of people had been disastrous, with patients harboring maggot-infested wounds, scurvy, and gangrene. Jim points out that, almost 40 years later, he’s now treating mostly hypertension and diabetes. Kidder then describes a visit to South Station, a bus terminal that sometimes serves as a relief from the frigid winter blizzards of Boston. Once temperatures rise above freezing, South Station is no longer a respite from the cold, and its inhabitants are evicted by the police and governmental officials.

Kidder details one such eviction and describes the removal of multiple people, some of whom have spent years sleeping in South Station: As the police remove one elderly woman, she pleads with them not to make her leave, telling them that if she had anywhere else to go, she wouldn’t be at South Station.