Operation Safety Net (OSN) is a Street Medicine program in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. OSN was founded when Dr. Jim Withers and Mike Sallows began to make “house calls” together at night under the bridges, along the river banks and in the abandoned buildings of Pittsburgh. In time, other formerly homeless outreach workers and medical volunteers joined the effort. In 1993, OSN became a nonprofit organization under the Pittsburgh Mercy Health System with Linda Sheets as the program administrator. It has grown into the nation’s first full-time street-based medical delivery system. OSN’s primary functions are to improve the well-being of the unsheltered homeless of Pittsburgh, advocate for health-care justice, educate health-care students, and to assist other cities to develop their own street medicine programs.
Operation Safety Net visits the unsheltered homeless directly where they sleep through walking teams of the formerly homeless and medical outreach staff. Most of OSN’s work force are volunteers, but a dedicated office/case management staff support all the field work. Services are available year-round, 24-hours a day. The work of OSN has evolved to include medical student education in the streets, housing, preventive health services, hospital consults, severe weather shelter and response, as well as extensive public education. OSN has received numerous national and international awards and was the subject of the documentary One Bridge to the Next.
Operation Safety Net became a model for other cities, such as, Santa Barbara, California; San Diego, California; Morgantown, West Virginia; Atlanta, Georgia; and Chicago, Illinois. Through extensive global networking, OSN helped to create a street medicine collaborative that hosts the annual International Street Medicine Symposium (supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Glaxo Smith Kline). As of 2007, there are 21 US cities and 11 international cities represented.
Famous quotes containing the words operation, safety and/or net:
“Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“To emancipate [the slaves] entirely throughout the Union cannot, I conceive, be thought of, consistently with the safety of the country.”
—Frances Trollope (1780–1863)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)