Doctor Yasmine Nascimento wanders into a slum in Rio de Janeiro to provide health care to patients, most of whom are drug addicts and homeless people who have no addresses or phone numbers.
Nascimento (33 years old) could have worked in a private clinic or a hospital in one of the upscale neighborhoods in the second largest Brazilian city. Instead, she spends her days on the impoverished north side of Rio de Janeiro providing health care to homeless patients on the streets, under bridges or in a place her team calls “The Cave,” a squalid squatter camp accessed through a hole in the wall. This place, filled with waste and sewage, is located under a subway line.
Nascimento works as part of the local Consultorio Na Rua, or “street clinic,” program that provides health care to some of the poorest and most marginalized areas of this city of six million known for widespread inequality.
“I consider medicine to be an exchange,” Nascimento said. “Working in a street clinic suits me because I can create a relationship with patients.”
The program has 13 teams across the city, each including a doctor, a psychiatrist, nurses, social workers and a driver, working together to try to fulfill Brazil’s promise of universal health care for the city’s nearly 8,000 homeless people.
These teams, whose members can be easily identified by their blue jackets, stay in constant contact with homeless people and addicts. This creates a sense of trust, which enables it to reach parts of the city that no other public entity can access, not even the police.
A homeless man outside the Jacarezinho slum told how he ended up on the street while the health team was making its round.
This forty-year-old man, who specializes in robotic engineering, spoke fluent English, and said that he used to work on oil exploration platforms all over the world.
There, in the middle of the ocean, he smoked crack cocaine for the first time.
He added, “I left the oil rig and looked for the first place I could buy crack and never returned to that life.”
– “Everything for us” –
For her part, nurse Quisia Ferreira (28 years old) said that the program “goes where no one wants to go” as her team was preparing to vaccinate homeless people against Covid-19 and influenza.
She added that despite the problems faced by Brazilian clinics that are overworked, “going out and providing health care on the streets is an example of an effective public health system for the population.”
One of the Cave patients left her residence because her husband abused her. On the street, she became a drug addict.
Despite all the misery, the woman smiles as she greets each member of the health team by name.
“These ladies are everything to us,” she said, adding, “They are second only to God in my life. They take care of us. I love them more than their husbands.”
AFP