Street Side Medics – a not-for-profit, GP-led mobile medical service – will launch in Adelaide this month as the state continues to see a rise in the number of people experiencing homelessness.

CEO Nic Brown says Street Side Medics decided to launch in South Australia after a “great conversation” with Premier Peter Malinauskas, making it the charity’s 17^th clinic in Australia.

“We’ve been looking at locations that we can support, and we had a great conversation with the Premier, who wanted to bring us down to Adelaide and felt like there was a need there for us,” Nic says.

The move has been prompted by the increase in homelessness in South Australia over the past six years, with between 200 and 240 people sleeping rough every night in Adelaide, according to the Adelaide Zero Project.

According to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2021, almost 7500 people were experiencing homelessness in South Australia on the 2021 Census night – an increase of five per cent on 2016.

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“We’ve seen increasing rates of homelessness, and at the same time, it’s a bit of a perfect storm in the sense that we’re also seeing a decrease in bulk billing rates,” Nic says.

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The mobile clinic will be outside the Adelaide City Salvos building at 227 Pirie Street every Wednesday from 5.30 pm to 7.30 pm from November 17.

It will be run by a roster of local volunteer GPs, nurses, junior doctors, allied health practitioners and general volunteers.

The clinic has a strict, no turn-away policy and offers the full suite of GP services, including general health check-ups, chronic and acute disease screening, pathology services and minor surgical procedures.

“Anything you can do in a GP practice, we can do in the van. There’s a patient bed in there, we can take bloods, we can do skin checks, we can do sutures,” Nic says.

Launched in 2020, Street Side Medics was the brainchild of the 2022 Young Australian of the Year, Dr Daniel Nour, and has supported more than 10,000 Australians who are experiencing or at risk of homelessness.

Street Side Medics currently operates in metropolitan and regional New South Wales, Victoria and Canberra, with plans to open a second clinic in South Australia on the cards.

Nic says that despite the increase in urgent care clinics, there are still barriers to people experiencing homelessness accessing healthcare.

“There still remain significant barriers down there in terms of transport, in terms of costs if you can’t cover the gap, if you can’t find a bulk-billing GP,” he says.

Nic says people experiencing homelessness are also often reluctant to attend GP clinics for fear of being judged for their appearance.

“You’ve got to be at a certain place at a certain time; they often feel they have to dress a certain way,” he says.

“That can be difficult when you’re just trying to find your next meal, where you might be sleeping that night, and so, healthcare drops off for this cohort of people as a priority – meeting people where they’re at is our focus.”

Asked if Street Side Medics would take pressure off the South Australian hospital system, Nic says that “in an ideal world, certainly”.

“We see often very simple things to treat, so something like a wound that gets infected, with some good wound dressing and antibiotics, that can be treated really easily, but if it’s left, it can cause sepsis, which ultimately can lead to death and people end up in an emergency department,” he says.

“Talking about things like managing chronic health issues like diabetes or heart disease, again, you help people to learn how to best manage their medication intake and how to get some education around managing those chronic health issues, again, is really important to reduce the risk of people ending up in emergency departments.”