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June 2022 (Volume 100)
Quarterly Article
Breena R. Taira
Hyung Kim
Karla Tlatelpa Prodigue
Leilani Gutierrez-Palominos
Alexis Aleman
Leora Steinberg
Gregory Tchakalian
Kabir Yadav
Reginald Tucker-Seeley
Jun 29, 2026
Jun 12, 2026
Jun 1, 2026
Back to The Milbank Quarterly
Policy Points:
Context: Prompted by stories of “patient dumping,” California enacted Senate Bill (SB) 1152, which mandates that hospitals offer patients experiencing homelessness (PEH) a set of resources at discharge to ensure safety and prevent dumping.
Methods: To evaluate interventions to meet the requirements of SB 1152 across three emergency departments (EDs) of a Los Angeles County public hospital system with a combined annual census of 260,000 visits, we used an explanatory sequential mixed methods approach, focusing first on quantitative evaluation and then using information from qualitative interviews to explain the quantitative findings.
Findings: In total, 2.9% (1,515/52,607) of encounters involved PEH. Documentation of compliance with the eight required components of SB 1152 was low, ranging from 9.0% to 33.9%. Twenty-five provider interviews confirmed support for providing assistance to PEH in the ED, but the participants described barriers to compliance, including challenges in implementing universal screening for homelessness, incongruity of the requirements with the ED setting, the complexity of the patients, and the limitations of SB 1152 as a health policy.
Conclusions: Despite operationalizing universal screening for homelessness, we found poor compliance with SB 1152 and identified multiple barriers to implementation.
Keywords: emergency department, homelessness, health policy, SB 1152, social emergency medicine.
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