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The city of Portland sent a cease-and-desist letter last month to a PeaceHealth clinic in Vancouver, Wash., alleging it discharged a disabled 70-year-old homeless woman from its care, stuck her in a cab, and sent her to a homeless shelter in Portland.
The city alleged the woman, who uses a wheelchair, languished in 90-degree heat for nearly eight hours on Sept. 2 before the shelter opened.
“They arrived at an overnight shelter nearly eight hours before the shelter’s scheduled opening. In those hours before staff could assist her, she sat alone and vulnerable on a Portland street, in nearly 90-degree heat,” City Attorney Robert Taylor wrote in the Sept. 10 letter to PeaceHealth president and CEO Elizabeth Dunne. “We request PeaceHealth immediately cease all patient transfer to Portland shelters without prior communication, planning, and approval, and request PeaceHealth immediately train all employees, staff, and caregivers about appropriate discharge requirements.”
The PeaceHealth clinic named in the city’s letter is the PeaceHealth Fisher’s Landing Clinic, which lies just across the Columbia River from Portland.
Rob Layne, a spokesman for Mayor Keith Wilson, says the woman was dropped off at one of Wilson’s newest nighttime shelters located in the Pearl District. He says the city does not believe the woman was from Portland, nor do they believe she requested such a transfer.
“The participant reported that they did not ask to be referred to a Portland shelter, but that they were told they were being taken to a place where she could get help,” Layne tells WW. “When she arrived, she did not have access to food or other support.”
Wilson mentioned the cease-and-desist letter during a presentation to the Metro Council on Oct. 21, in which he said that “hospital dumping” of homeless people on the streets was “something that occurs.”
“I met with them and explained to them, if it happens again, you’ll be sued,” Wilson said.
The issue came up after Metro Councilor Christine Lewis questioned Wilson’s strategy of sending homeless people back to family in other cities and states, one of the pillars of his ambitious pledge to end unsheltered homelessness within his first year of taking office.
Lewis said the idea of reunification “underscores what I’m going to call the magnet myth, the idea that the bulk of these people aren’t from here. They are not going home to Topeka, they’re going home to West Linn.”
Wilson said that based on the latest “point in time” count from Multnomah County, 26% of people living on Portland’s streets are from another state. “I think that’s an undercount,” he told Lewis.
Indeed, the theory that other states and cities send homeless people to Portland is hotly contested. So is the idea that a portion of homeless people come to Portland because they believe resources are abundant and the culture is more permissive of tents.
Layne says the city has “heard reports of hospitals and jails dropping folks off into homelessness on the streets” but that this was the first “verified report of a hospital from out of state” dropping someone off at a city shelter.
PeaceHealth did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
