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PHOENIX (AP) — Alfred Handley leaned back in his wheelchair alongside a major Phoenix freeway as a street medicine team helped him get rehydrated with an intravenous saline solution dripping from a bag hanging on a pole. Cars whooshed by under the as the 59-year-old homeless man with a nearly toothless smile got the help he needed through a new program run by the nonprofit Circle the City. “It’s a lot better than going to the hospital,” Handley said of the team that provides health care to homeless people.

He’s been treated poorly at traditional clinics and hospitals, he said, more than six years after being struck by a car while he sat on a wall, leaving him in a wheelchair. Circle the City introduced its IV rehydration program as a way to protect homeless people from life-threatening heat illness in America’s hottest metro. Homeless people accounted for in Maricopa County, which encompasses metro Phoenix.



Dr. Liz Frye, vice chair of the that provides training to hundreds of health care teams worldwide, said she didn’t know of groups other than Circle the City administering IVs on the street. “But if that’s what needs to happen to keep somebody from dying, I’m all about it,” Frye said.

As summers , health providers from San Diego to New York are being challenged Even the , featured in last year’s book, “Rough Sleepers,” now sees patients with mild heat exhaustion in the summer after decades of treating people with frostbite and hypothermia during .

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