More than 525 homeless people housed as Sacramento's Whole Person Care program expands effort

Age breakdown of participants in Sacramento’s Pathways to Health + Home program

Since Sacramento launched Whole Person Care in November 2017, 526 participants have been placed in permanent or transitional housing through the program, according to a new tally presented to City Council on Tuesday night.

Mayor Darrell Steinberg and his fellow council members voted Tuesday evening to allocate $3.7 million in state money from last year’s budget to Whole Person Care to help get more people into permanent housing. The money will be used to provide rental subsidies. It can also be used to provide transportation for clients to housing appointments, including picking up Housing Choice vouchers or viewing apartments.

Ramona Jasper and Anthony Moss were among the 508 people placed in permanent or transitional housing through Pathways to Health + Home

“These numbers show that with assertive outreach and wraparound services, even the most chronically homeless people can be brought indoors,” said Mayor Darrell Steinberg. “These are some of the oldest and most medically fragile people in our region, the folks who wound up in our emergency rooms again and again. Through Whole Person Care, hundreds of them have been stabilized and placed in permanent homes.”

Whole Person Care — called Pathways to Health + Home in Sacramento — is a four-year pilot program funded by federal Medicaid dollars matched by local funds.The city’s match was mostly provided by major health care systems, including Sutter Health , Dignity, UC Davis and Kaiser Permanente. Sacramento is the only city in the state to operate a Whole Person Care program other than San Francisco, which is also a county.

Whole Person Care provides wraparound services to homeless clients, including health care, mental health services, housing assistance, substance abuse treatment and help with such tasks as securing identification. Inter-disciplinary teams identify the most vulnerable homeless people with high medical needs and conduct assertive outreach to get them enrolled.

The program is scheduled to sunset at the end of 2020. Administrators are working on plans to transition participants to other programs, such as the revamped Medi-Cal program proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, which is modeled after Whole Person Care.