By Rachel Ewing and Daphne Sashin
It was early June 2020 when they first loaded their van with a pop-up tent, folding tables, masks, hand sanitizer, and a cooler full of testing chemicals. That week, temperatures were rising. In more affluent parts of the city, storefronts were being boarded up to prevent damage amid protests against racial injustice. COVID-19 had only just crested its first wave, and three Penn Medicine staff members had joined together to bring free testing to a community already under siege from a different, long-simmering crisis: opioid use.
The needs there are vast. Once an ordinary working-class neighborhood, over the last decade Kensington has become one of the largest hubs of the illicit opioid drug trade in the northeastern United States. The streets are home to hundreds of unhoused individuals, many of them in active substance use, many with medical comorbidities.
In tight quarters with few resources, this was a community at risk of being left behind and left out of newer forms of relief as the COVID-19 crisis unfolded. The Penn team reasoned that with very little money and a lot of dedication, they could make a difference by offering free tests. Along the way, with a short research survey, they hoped to gain some insight into how the pandemic was changing access to food, employment, and safe shelter – if people already at the edge of a cliff were in more danger of falling off, could the team learn how to save some of them?
Continue reading the full story, along with other stories of community impact, at Penn Medicine’s Service in Action.