At Street Medicine St. Louis, we believe everyone deserves healthcare, regardless of their housing status. In 2025, we continued to live that mission, providing medical care to the unhoused of St. Louis.

We’re proud to share our 2025 Impact Report, and while it took us a while to compile, every number below represents records that were compiled and reviewed by hand, patient by patient. These data tell an important story, one about the state of our city and the citizens that fall through the cracks.

The Headline Number: 402 Patients, and Counting

In 2025, our team cared for 402 unique patients across more than 1,033 episodes of care — up from 316 patients in 2024. That’s roughly a 27% increase in one year, achieved by expanding our outreach to new days and new locations, particularly in North St. Louis.

Growth like this is a good problem to have, but it’s also a sobering one. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum — it happens because more of our neighbors are living unsheltered, and because word has spread that our team shows up, meets people where they are, and treats them with dignity.

What the Numbers Reveal About the Need

The statistics from this year’s data stand out as evidence of just how essential — and how underserved — this population’s medical needs are:

• About 30% of our medical encounters resulted in a prescription these patients would not otherwise have been able to access. For people without stable housing, insurance, transportation, or a pharmacy they can return to, a prescription medication is often the only bridge between a treatable condition and a medical crisis.
• 11% of medical encounters replaced ER and urgent care visits. This is likely an underestimate, given the record system used for the first half of the year did a poor job of tracking acuity. However, we believe this care is important for both the patients and our overburdened emergency departments. Further, we hope that as a source of regular care, we are preventing the health catastrophes that lead to health emergencies.
• 10% of our encounters were specifically for substance use disorder — reflecting both the scale of the addiction crisis on our streets and the trust our team has built to engage patients in care they might otherwise never seek out.

Skin and soft tissue infections, substance use disorders, and musculoskeletal concerns remained our top chief complaints this year — a pattern consistent with the physical toll of living outdoors, and one that underscores why relationship-based, recurring care (not one-off encounters) is what actually moves the needle for this population.

Scratching the Surface

As encouraging as our growth has been, we want to be honest: 402 patients is not the full picture of unmet need in St. Louis. 2025 brought real headwinds — a devastating tornado that displaced countless residents, federal funding cuts to social services, and policy shifts away from supportive housing models that have pushed some of our patients back onto the street. These forces have made our work harder even as they’ve made it more necessary.

And the trend isn’t slowing down. We’re already exceeding our 2025 numbers in 2026 — a sign that the need in our community continues to grow faster than the safety net meant to catch it.

A Little Bit of Love Goes a Long Way

Everything we do — tent-side wound care, medication delivery, longitudinal follow-up through our new electronic health record, care coordination with hospitals and shelters — is made possible by the volunteers, donors, and partners who believe that healthcare is a human right, not a privilege tied to housing status.

If these numbers resonate with you — if you believe, like we do, that everyone deserves access to care regardless of where they sleep at night — we’d love for you to join us. Whether that means volunteering your clinical skills, spreading the word, or making a financial contribution, your support directly translates into more encampments visited, more prescriptions filled, and more lives stabilized.

Support Street Medicine St. Louis →

Together, we can keep meeting people where they are.

— The Street Medicine St. Louis Team

Nathanial Nolan, MD MPH MHPE