KJZZ: Meet the team that delivers health care to homeless patients on the streets of Phoenix

Perla Puebla and her team are at the Burnidge Soup Kitchen near 35th Avenue and Osborn Road in Phoenix. Hair pulled back and wearing dark blue scrubs, Puebla is huddled next to one of her colleagues as she stares into her laptop. 

“Who am I seeing next, Brenda?” she asks.

“Joe, but I haven’t taken his vitals yet,” her colleague responds.

Puebla is the Associate Medical Director of Street Medicine with Circle the City, a non-profit organization that provides mobile health care to unhoused individuals around the Valley. 

“Every day is different,” she says. “Today we’re at the soup kitchen. So we’re seeing patients that are coming here for breakfast.”

The team arrived a few hours earlier. When they’re not here, they’re driving around the city delivering healthcare to people in parks, street corners or alleys.

Caring for the most vulnerable

On this day, she says, “We have seen a patient with diabetes; a patient needing medication refills; we’ve seen a patient with constipation, high blood pressure. Yesterday, we saw several wounds and skin infections.”

Which often occur from sleeping outside.

“They get bites from insects, and they start scratching those and those can turn into infections and abscesses and cellulitis. It’s pretty painful.”

They also support patients struggling with their mental health.

“We see a lot of depression, anxiety, severe mental illness. … We have a behavioral health specialist with us; she helps with that. We do refill medications for depression, anxiety.”

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