Street Medicine’s Joy Fernandez de Narayan obtains her Doctor of Nursing Practice.

Joy Fernandez came to Mercy Care almost five and a half years ago as a Nurse Practitioner. Though she originally entered her BSN at Kennesaw State with the intention to serve in Latin America with missional medicine, using her Spanish fluency, she felt a pull to stay in Atlanta with the great need present. She found her fit with the street medicine team at Mercy Care.

“Poverty is right here. There are people out there dying on the streets because no one wants to or is capable of providing the care that they need. So I became a nurse practitioner. And I decided to stick with it.” Her masters schooling at Emory equipped her with extensive medical knowledge, preparing her for the diverse cases she would later encounter in street medicine. “They trained you as if you were the only medical help within 30 miles,” Joy said.

The street medicine program is a unique section of Mercy Care’s services where a lean team of medical professionals go out into the streets daily to personally meet with individuals experiencing homelessness who have not sought clinical help for whatever reasons. These can typically be from mental or social barriers, but they can also be limited by transportation or cost of a visit.

Joy said she chose the nursing model of health above others because she agreed with the philosophy of holistic healing. “It’s focused on whole-person health versus disease-focused care,” she said. “We’re creating healing spaces, and using medicine where it’s necessary. We don’t look at someone and say, ‘you’re a diabetic.’ We think together, ‘what in your lifestyle can be improved?'”

Two years ago, Joy set out to take her education to the next level. She enrolled in online classes at Chamberlain University to obtain her Doctorate of Nursing Practice. As of January 2019, she received the title. Some day she would like to teach at a university, she said, but for now she will continue working with the street medicine team. Joy is known for her well-suited name, as well as her dedication and patience with clients.

“Most recently we’ve been working with a woman who became homeless at the age of 70,” Joy said. “At first she was in shelters, but has become so increasingly paranoid that you’re lucky to get her name out of her. She’s convinced that bad things happen to people who interact with her, because they never come back. So we came back. And we visited her every week.” This winter, for the first time in many years, the woman spent a night in a shelter. Though it can be a slow process, building trust with clients experiencing homelessness is a major part of the street medicine program’s mission — and a strong vocation for the team members.

“The life expectancy for people on the streets is about 53, which is over 20 years less than the average person’s life expectancy. We, the street medicine program, feel that is unacceptable,” Joy concluded. “If we can make a difference in our corner of the world, and keep people alive and bring them back into the fold… then that is what I want to be doing.”

“There’s a bible verse where Jesus talks about the parable of the 100 sheep. He has 99, but one is lost – and he goes off to the find the one. And leaving the 99 to go off and find the lost one seems kind of irrational and unreasonable, unless you are the one. I feel like that is street medicine. We’re dealing with people who have fallen out of care, fallen through the cracks and are just disillusioned by the system. They’re not necessarily willing to trust people any more.
…We’re leaving the 99 patients we already have to go after that one still out there that won’t come in.“