Hospitalized homeless patients in search of shelter find refuge in Fort Worth
Robert Smith was in the hospital with a host of medical problems: His doctors were worried there was cancer on his spleen, and decided to do surgery to remove the organ.
But his problems didn’t stop there. Smith was also homeless, and didn’t have any place to go after he was discharged.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do once I got out of the hospital,” Smith said.
But Smith found a place to stay at the Salvation Army in Fort Worth, through a recuperative care program run by JPS Health Network that is designed to offer homeless patients a clean, safe environment in which to recover. But the program does more than help homeless patients recover. It also helps keep them from returning to the emergency room, which homeless patients are prone to do because of the myriad health problems they are typically grappling with.
“This program helps to keep them out of the hospital and out of the emergency room,” said Jill Stafford, practice manager at JPS, who oversees the recuperative care program.
Patients like Smith, 72, have a better chance of recovering and staying out of the hospital when they’re in the program, Stafford said. After about a month of recovery, Smith enrolled in another Salvation Army program, and is taking computer classes and has applied for Social Security benefits.
There are 10 beds available through the recuperative care program: Three at the Salvation Army, and seven at Presbyterian Night Shelter. The average length of stay is about 46 days, Stafford said. While patients are in recuperative care, they are tended to by a JPS nurse and nurse practitioner, and agree to contact JPS staff before going to the emergency room, Stafford said.
Occasionally, the beds can also be used before a patient has to go to the hospital, for example when a patient is preparing for a colonoscopy. That can be a problem for homeless patients without access to a toilet, Stafford said.
Stafford said she isn’t sure how much money the program has saved JPS by preventing hospital readmissions.
“Prevention is hard to measure,” she said, but added that the program is in the process of becoming nationally certified and will begin to collect more data to measure outcomes and cost savings.
The program, which started about seven years ago, has treated more than 200 patients in the last four years, Stafford said.
Wound care is the number one reason patients are referred to the program, Stafford said.
Homeless patients are typically sicker than the general public. One study found that homeless adults in Oakland died at a rate 3.5 times greater than their peers who were housed. Another study found that homeless men between 45 and 64 are 40% to 50% more likely to die of heart disease than men with stable homes.
Recuperative care also provided a safe haven for Timothy Sawyer. Sawyer, a former police officer, suffers from degenerative spinal stenosis. He had suffered “one injury after another,” he said, and most recently slipped and fell, fracturing his spinal cord and severing an artery. After he spent time in the JPS intensive care unit and had surgery on his artery, he was in the recuperative care program for about a month.
Before he was in the hospital, Sawyer was living in his car and couch surfing, he said. Now Sawyer, like Smith, is enrolled in another Salvation Army program through which he’s getting housing and support for his mental health and substance use disorder. He’s also taking computer classes.
“I’m being taken care of because they’re monitoring what’s happened,” he said.
His goal is to get a job, and someday return to the Salvation Army as a caseworker, to provide others with the same support he’s received.
This story was originally published November 20, 2025 at 2:23 PM.
