Circle the City Awarded Health Care for the Homeless Contract

Succeeds Maricopa County Department of Health Services as county-wide provider

PHOENIX (December 18, 2017) – Circle the City has been designated to succeed the Maricopa County Department of Public Health in the important work of providing county-wide health care for people facing homelessness. The award includes nearly $3 million in new Health Care for the Homeless (HCH) funding, renewable annually through the U.S. Department of Health Resources and Services Administration.

“After more than three decades of providing compassionate care to the homeless, we recognized the opportunity to further enhance this mission via a structured transition of services to a private nonprofit organization,” said Dr. Bob England, director of the Maricopa County Department of Public Health. “Circle the City was the obvious choice to succeed us in this good work.”

In the coming months, Circle the City plans to replicate its established continuum of care to benefit the more than 7,000 people who seek assistance from the Maricopa County Human Services Campus located at 220 S. 12th Avenue. Circle the City’s healthcare services will be initially implemented on January 2, 2018.
Circle the City’s established programs include a medical respite center that opened in 2012 to provide quality medical care for ill and injured adult men and women facing homelessness. The state-of-the-art, 50-bed facility was the vision of Circle the City’s Founder and Chief Medical Officer Sister Adele O’Sullivan, who recognized critical gaps in medical services while serving as Medical Director for the County’s Health Care for the Homeless Program from 1996-2009. In 2015, Circle the City opened The Parsons Family Health Center to provide integrative outpatient services including behavioral health, case management, and substance abuse intervention, and launched a two-exam room Mobile Medical Clinic to extend outreach to parks, supportive housing complexes and partner agencies throughout greater Phoenix.

Circle the City’s innovative model has created tremendous cost savings for the local healthcare industry, and with this new funding plans to scale services to serve more than 10,000 people facing homelessness in 2018.
“We are honored by the confidence that Dr. England and the team at the Maricopa County Department of Public Health have invested in us,” said Circle the City Chief Executive Officer Brandon Clark. “We are thrilled at the opportunity to build on their legacy of compassion and innovation.”
The Maricopa County Department of Public Health established Health Care for the Homeless in 1984 to provide basic care for the homeless population in downtown Phoenix. Since then, the program has evolved to include an integrated system of health care services that includes street outreach, primary care, substance abuse services, behavior health, case management and nutrition service throughout the county for homeless individuals and families.

About Circle the City

Circle the City is an Arizona 501(c)(3) nonprofit community health organization dedicated to providing high quality, holistic healthcare to men, women, and children facing homelessness in Maricopa County. The organization’s homeless continuum of care is one-of-a-kind in the state of Arizona and one of the only models of its kind in the nation. Patients benefit from several different models of care offered within Circle the City’s family of programs, including primary care services, integrative outpatient behavioral health and substance abuse services, mobile health outreach services, or medical respite services in Circle the City’s flagship 50-bed care center. For more information, please visit www.circlethecity.org or call (623) 900-2203.

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