New COTS Recovery Care Center in Petaluma for Sonoma County Homeless

The beds are in place and the walls have recently been painted at the new Lassar Wellness Center in Petaluma. And a waiting list is lining up to get through the doors when it officially opens on November 1st.

The center, which will offer homeless people a safe place to recuperate after being discharged from the hospital or emergency room, is located at the Mary Isaac Shelter in Petaluma, which is operated by COTS, a renowned homeless services organization.

Clients at the Lassar Center will be able to stay for up to 90 days while they recover and will be provided with resources to help them get back on their feet and find permanent housing.

“We want people to come here and really heal and have a place to do it,” said Chris Cabral, CEO of COTS.

Experts say this approach helps people acquire and maintain health more effectively, prevents people from returning to homelessness, and is much more cost-effective because it reduces repeat hospital visits.

“Recovery programs encourage people to get and stay home by connecting people to the health care and resources they need to stabilize physically and mentally so they can get back on their feet,” said Chris Stewart, medical director of Santa Rosa Community Health. , or SRCH, is a community health care provider with eight medical clinics in Santa Rosa.

“These approaches also reduce costs for society and social safety nets and, of course, improve people’s quality of life,” Stewart said. “Keeping people out of the hospital is always cheaper.”

Providing 24-hour shelter, food and care to someone in a nonprofit’s rehabilitation care unit costs COTS about $200 a day, Cabral said, many thousands less than the cost of providing the same services in a hospital.

Preventing a return to the streets

The California Health Care Foundation defines restorative care, also called medical respite care, as intended for people who are too “sick or infirm to recover from physical illness or injury on the street or in a shelter, but who are not sick enough to be in a hospital. »

Santa Rosa Public Health’s homeless patients are “twice as likely to suffer from respiratory disease and nearly three times as likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease as our hospitalized patients.” Stewart said.

Managing these illnesses requires regular medications, a healthy diet and low stress levels, “which is challenging when you are homeless or insecure and recovering from an acute event,” he said.

At COTS, which already had a six-bed intensive care unit in operation, exit data shows that 85% of the 167 people discharged from the unit since 2021 have moved into some form of alternative housing rather than returning to the streets. – said Cabral.

That figure stuck with Fatima Lassar of Petaluma, who contributed the $650,000 needed to build the new center on the building’s second floor.

“The percentage of people who do not return to homelessness after receiving rehabilitative care is extremely high, so this seemed like a good place to invest the money,” Lassar said. The center named in her honor will be one of two in the county for homeless people; the other is the 33-bed Nightingale program at Catholic Charities Caritas Center in Santa Rosa.

Recently, in the community room of the new center, Lassar watched as COTS staff hung Sonoma County landscapes she painted. Dormer windows illuminated the corridors. Final decisions were made on the right combination of bright colors for the walls.

“It’s very gratifying,” Lassar said.

The target opening date is November 1, when six new beds will open. There is already a waiting list; COTS receives three to four referrals a day from local hospitals, Cabral said. The goal is to open the last eight beds by the end of the year, making a total of 20 beds.

The existing rehab center’s clientele, typically older, is a mix of circumstances: people who have recently become homeless, people who are chronically homeless, or those who, as Cabral puts it, “have come through the shelter system, into permanent housing and were not successful. And they go through the continuum again.”

Rehabilitation center clients are provided with medical care by Petaluma Medical Center staff who are at the facility three days a week. The facility employs a licensed clinical social worker. And account managers work 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“They can help with things like finding housing, navigating the health care system, providing transportation to doctor’s appointments. All these things come together as one,” Cabral said.

The expansion is welcome, said Cabral, who joined the nonprofit in 2023.

“Even before I got to COTS, they knew they would eventually need a larger program,” she said. “That’s one of the first things I came across when I came here: We need more space for rehabilitative care.”

You can reach staff writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or [email protected]. On X (Twitter) @jeremyhay