Christ House

Cause Area

  • Health & Medicine
  • Homeless & Housing

Location

1717 Columbia Road, NWWashington, DC 20009 United States
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Organization Information

Mission Statement

The mission of Christ House is to provide comprehensive and compassionate health care to men with illness who are experiencing homelessness in Washington, DC and offer assistance in breaking the cycle of homelessness.

Description

Christ House opened in December 1985 as the first 24-hour residential medical facilitie for homeless men and women in the United States. Today, Christ House is still the only facility of its kind in the Washington, DC metropolitan area where over 6,000 people experience homelessness every day. To the best of our knowledge, there are only 13 stand-alone residential medical facilities for the homeless like Christ House in all of the U.S. and Canada. Since our inception, we have had over 7,700 admissions.

Patients are admitted to Christ House from area hospitals, shelters, clinics, and medical outreach projects. They suffer from a variety of illnesses and injuries including cancer, hypertension and stroke, liver disease, kidney failure, diabetes and related amputations, HIV/AIDS, respiratory disease, major lacerations, fractures, and ulcerations of the skin. Many are malnourished, anemic, depressed, and desperately disconnected from healthy sources of support.

In 2012, Christ House provided health care to 261 homeless individuals and provided 10,407 patient-days of care - the busiest we have been since 1997. In addition to the primary illness(es) for which they were admitted, 87.4 percent had either HIV, drugs or alcohol addiction, or psychiatric illness, and over 25 percent had three of those diagnoses.

Seventy-seven percent of our patients in 2010 were African American, 65 percent were over the age of 50, and 10 percent were veterans of the armed forces. Over 58 percent had no income and 62 percent had monthly income under $250

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