Continuity Within Chaos: Caring for Individuals Living Chronically in Shelters and on the Streets is the focus of this installment of Stonehill College’s Saint Andre Lecture Series on “Welcoming the Other.” The presenter will be Dr. James J. O’Connell, President of Boston Health Care for Homeless Program, and Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
“Welcoming the Other” is the ongoing theme for this lecture series at Stonehill College, as Saint André spent much of his life serving as a humble porter welcoming people to the College de Notre Dame in Montreal. Every year the College welcomes a speaker whose work or writing has explored the problem of exclusion and the possibilities for acceptance and greater understanding.
The lecture will be offered in the McCarthy Auditorium in May Hall on the Stonehill College campus.
More on the Presenter:
Jim O’Connell, M.D., serves as the president of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program (BHCHP) and is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He received his medical degree from Harvard University in 1982 and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). In 1985, he began full-time clinical work with homeless individuals as the founding physician of the program. He established the nation’s first medical respite program in 1985, with 25 beds nested within the Lemuel Shattuck Shelter. Working with the MGH Laboratory of Computer Science, he designed and implemented the nation’s first computerized medical record for a homeless program.
O’Connell served as the national program director of the Homeless Families Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. O’Connell is the editor of The Health Care of Homeless Persons: A Manual of Communicable Diseases and Common Problems in Shelters and on the Streets. His articles have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Circulation, the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, and several other medical journals. His first book, Stories from the Shadows: Reflections of a Street Doctor, was published in 2015 and featured on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. His work at BHCHP is the subject of the New York Times best-seller Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People by Tracy Kidder, published in 2023.
