By Pepper Fisher

PORT ANGELES – Clallam County Health & Human Services has launched a pilot program designed to provide shelter and medical services to Clallam County residents who are homeless and in need of a safe place to recover from illness or injury.

It’s called the Clallam Respite Care Program. The county has contracted with Olympic Peninsula Community Clinic (OPCC) to provide the staffing for the two-year pilot project, and the patients will be housed in the Serenity House Shelter in Port Angeles.

County Public Health Nurse Supervisor Karissa McLane explained to us what specific need the program is filling.

“When we first started this program, the reason that we started even talking about it was, we at the Health Department were getting a bunch of calls from Serenity House, OPCC, the emergency department and the Olympic Medical Center discharge team. They all had the same issue, which is, there’s people in our community who don’t have a home and are recovering from illness or injury. They’re not sick enough to be in a hospital, they’re too sick to be in the street, and they need more support than, like, a bunk bed at Serenity House.”

The new addition at Serenity House makes it possible to set aside space for four small, private rooms with hospital beds and individualized care. McLane says the project began in October, and they’ve been able to help 8 patients in the first quarter. How has it worked out so far?

“And they’ve been getting really great feedback from specialty providers and primary care providers, seeing, you know, patients who had been back and forth between the ER and the street, or the ER and Serenity House, and now they’re really getting some of these acute needs taken care of.”

The $460,000 cost of the 2-year pilot program is coming from federal ARPA funds obtained during the pandemic.

We asked McLane about the long-term plan. How will the program be funded after the 2-year pilot is complete?

“The great news about medical respite is, the state legislature just approved to have medical respite be a reimbursable service to Medicaid. And so, in the future, an agency will be able to bill Medicaid for respite care services. The one hitch that we run into, with that long-term funding plan, is that OPCC, by nature of being a volunteer-run free clinic, they are not able to bill Medicaid. So, our partners at North Olympic Healthcare Network or Olympic Medical Center are going to need to step in and support this program in a little more hands-on way than they are at this point, so that we can continue running this program.”