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:
“It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. The only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of “Wut,” is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)
“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.... Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.”
—Joseph Heller (b. 1923)
“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)