Unity Health Care to provide medical care for Hope Has A Home™
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On Wednesday, March 20 Unity Health Care participated in a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the District’s first women’s medical respite location, Hope Has A Home™.
A partnership with VOA Chesapeake & Carolinas, AmeriHealth Caritas DC, Pathways to Housing DC, The Developing Families Fund, The Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, and Unity Health Care, Hope Has A Home™ for Women will serve at least 30 women annually in the District who are experiencing homelessness, behavioral health challenges, and chronic health conditions. This impactful collaboration with Hope Has a Home ™ will provide medical care, case management and other social services operated by women and specifically for women to meet this need.
Unity has a long history providing medical respite in the District of Columbia. Unity’s co-founder Janelle Goetcheus founded Christ House, one of the nation’s first medical respite programs in 1985, to meet a critical need in our community that still continues today with more than 1600 women currently facing homelessness in the District this year.
Unity’s President and CEO Dr. Jessica Henderson Boyd spoke at the event, sharing “I am grateful that Unity can be part of this innovative initiative where community-based partners, payers and health providers are working in new and different ways to achieve improved health outcomes and achieve health equity.” She continued, “We know medical respite works; we see it every day with our patients. Our medical respite programs across the District have demonstrated in the data that stable housing, and access to food and health care improve lives.”
As this important program opens, medical respite in the District is facing significant funding challenges. As the population of men and women experiencing homelessness ages comes the significant burden of declining health. Dr. Boyd shared, “My hope is that Hope Has a Home serves as a demonstration that medical respite programs are critically necessary and need to remain a priority in the District and beyond moving forward.”
