AZ Central: ’Street medicine is important’: Phoenix groups prioritize access to skin care for unhoused folks

When Margarita Mendez treats patients, they often tell her they haven’t felt love in a long time.

As the senior nurse manager at Circle the City, a Phoenix-based organization that primarily treats people experiencing homelessness in need of medical care, patients often entrust her with their stories and what they’ve experienced at other health and housing facilities.

Mendez vividly recalls one patient she worked with, a woman who had a chronic infestation of lice but had not been able to get treatment.

The patient had been turned away from other boarding facilities because they did not have any lice treatment available, and they prioritized preventing a facility-wide outbreak. She learned to live with the chronic itching, sores from scratching, lack of sleep and isolation caused by the lice infection.