Companies just hate the homeless. While working as a nurse I interacted with a fair number of homeless people, I live in the northeast and in a small city so they're not as numerous as in California, but there's a sizable population still. I don't want to say that they as a group received worse care and were treated worse on average because I have a sample size of like 8 homeless out of probably 400+ patients, but only a few times did I come home from work and just broke down crying. The day I watched someone die was one, the day one of the low level employees was unable to walk and was sent home because the hospital wanted the bed open, and the day I had to discharge a homeless person to the street.
For additional context, my unit had a few long term patients, mainly when you can't find somewhere for them to be discharged to. We had a man there for around 5 months who was still hospitalized by the time I was fired and another for 3 months by the time I was fired. No facility would accept them and they had no family that would take them. This homeless person was also in a similar situation where there were no open shelters and no hotel rooms available for him to be sent to. He didn't want to go to a shelter because he was afraid of violence. Despite my fighting to keep him in the hospital until there could at least be a roof where he could be offered, they just wanted the bed open so they pushed and pushed until I was basically told that I can't do anything else and if I did anymore I'd be disciplined which meant fired because months before I had been given a final warning during the probationary period because I was a new nurse and messed up charting so any further discipline was going to mean termination.
Also the amount of medicine that we throw away in the hospital is unreal. Advair disks have like a month's supply in them and we'd use them for like 3 days while they're in the hospital and then have to throw them away because obviously you can't reuse it, but a lot of the time the person would be prescribed the disk on discharge anyway so they'd have to go and buy it. Unlike food as well, handing the person that disk that they were using in the hospital would legally be considered dispensing medication which is outside the bounds of nursing practice thus you could easily be fired and lose your license if people found out. Sometimes though you'd forget it in the room and not find it when you cleaned up or somehow it found its way into the person's luggage along with other things. Like we'd be told explicitly to give someone materials for wound treatment sometimes otherwise it was not acceptable to give them anything like that. Not that it didn't stop a number of nurses from giving people some stuff that'd be considered super expensive otherwise like specialty dressings. The hospital also doesn't itemize stuff like that so I could use 4 bandage wraps on one person's paper cut and if I only put down what dressing I applied they'd only charge the one with the wound treatment.
Companies just hate the homeless. While working as a nurse I interacted with a fair number of homeless people, I live in the northeast and in a small city so they're not as numerous as in California, but there's a sizable population still. I don't want to say that they as a group received worse care and were treated worse on average because I have a sample size of like 8 homeless out of probably 400+ patients, but only a few times did I come home from work and just broke down crying. The day I watched someone die was one, the day one of the low level employees was unable to walk and was sent home because the hospital wanted the bed open, and the day I had to discharge a homeless person to the street.
For additional context, my unit had a few long term patients, mainly when you can't find somewhere for them to be discharged to. We had a man there for around 5 months who was still hospitalized by the time I was fired and another for 3 months by the time I was fired. No facility would accept them and they had no family that would take them. This homeless person was also in a similar situation where there were no open shelters and no hotel rooms available for him to be sent to. He didn't want to go to a shelter because he was afraid of violence. Despite my fighting to keep him in the hospital until there could at least be a roof where he could be offered, they just wanted the bed open so they pushed and pushed until I was basically told that I can't do anything else and if I did anymore I'd be disciplined which meant fired because months before I had been given a final warning during the probationary period because I was a new nurse and messed up charting so any further discipline was going to mean termination.
Also the amount of medicine that we throw away in the hospital is unreal. Advair disks have like a month's supply in them and we'd use them for like 3 days while they're in the hospital and then have to throw them away because obviously you can't reuse it, but a lot of the time the person would be prescribed the disk on discharge anyway so they'd have to go and buy it. Unlike food as well, handing the person that disk that they were using in the hospital would legally be considered dispensing medication which is outside the bounds of nursing practice thus you could easily be fired and lose your license if people found out. Sometimes though you'd forget it in the room and not find it when you cleaned up or somehow it found its way into the person's luggage along with other things. Like we'd be told explicitly to give someone materials for wound treatment sometimes otherwise it was not acceptable to give them anything like that. Not that it didn't stop a number of nurses from giving people some stuff that'd be considered super expensive otherwise like specialty dressings. The hospital also doesn't itemize stuff like that so I could use 4 bandage wraps on one person's paper cut and if I only put down what dressing I applied they'd only charge the one with the wound treatment.