Marcel Slockers

92 Chapter 6 Patient A. is a 42-year old homeless Dutch man who had been brought to the street doctor’s practice, sick and deranged, by a homeless friend. According to this friend, A. had been homeless for eleven months after he was evicted, due to difficulties in paying the rent. His passport had been stolen, he no longer had a mailing address as he was not officially registered and therefore he was no longer insured. A. is an insulin dependent diabetic and has not been injecting insulin now for some weeks. After examination, the physician sent him to the hospital andA. was admitted to the intensive care ward. When he was discharged from hospital, he got a prescription for insulin and went to the pharmacy in vain. They refused to give an uninsured person the expensive insulin. Why uninsured? In our survey within the NSG network of some hundred doctors and nurses, we not only asked for the numbers of uninsured homeless but we also inquired about factors that had possibly contributed to being uninsured. Twenty-nine respondents mentioned factors that are related to either the characteristics of homeless people, or to the regulations and procedures of institutions and care workers.