READING, Pa. \u2013 This extreme cold can be dangerous and even deadly, especially for people with nowhere warm to go.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why teams from Reading Hospital were out in the cold, checking on some of the city\u2019s most vulnerable residents through its \u201cStreet Medicine\u201d program.<\/p>\n
\u201cStreet Medicine is a program that provides free health care to people who are housing insecure,\u201d said Christine Nepple, the clinical director of Street Medicine at Tower Health.<\/p>\n
The team brings care directly to the streets \u2014 visiting shelters, street corners and outreach sites across Reading and offering medical services without appointments or insurance.<\/p>\n
When temperatures drop, the work intensifies.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we did today was kind of go outside for about six hours,\u201d Nepple said. \u201cWe hit the south side of town to places where we know people are living outside, let them know that weather is coming, and let them know the options for emergency shelters this weekend: places they can get warm, places they can get food.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of those outreach locations is the YMCA in Reading, where Street Medicine providers regularly connect with people who don\u2019t always have a warm place to go.<\/p>\n
Along with medical care, the team hands out essentials.<\/p>\n
\u201cSleeping bags in the winter. We give cool weather sleeping bags in the summer. Tents, tarps, backpacks full of supplies,\u201d Nepple said.<\/p>\n
The need is growing.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver the last six months, the amount of patients that we have seen has exponentially increased,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
Street Medicine says anyone interested in helping can donate supplies<\/a> or volunteer<\/a> to support the program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. \u2013 This extreme cold can be dangerous and even deadly, especially for people with nowhere warm…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93346,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[45000,391,23292,128,130,129,2791,45954],"class_list":{"0":"post-93345","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-reading","8":"tag-emergency-shelter","9":"tag-homelessness","10":"tag-outreach","11":"tag-reading-city","12":"tag-reading-city-headlines","13":"tag-reading-city-news","14":"tag-reading-hospital","15":"tag-street-medicine"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}