Health
- Research
Urban poverty and homelessness keep growing while investments in health-promoting services and public infrastructure, including drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) have been decreasing. We used a mixed-method approach to collect data from 45 unhoused individuals in Germany identifying individual, infrastructure-specific, and location-based solutions to improve public WASH. Suggestions included adapting existing infrastructure, opening up existing, but inaccessible and constructing new inclusive infrastructure. Proactive, long-term sustainable solutions were preferred over reactive short-time options. Realizing safe WASH for all requires collaboration between homeless communities, governmental bodies, NGOs, businesses, and sanitation experts.
- Research
Emergency shelters offer temporary sleeping accommodation to people deprived of housing and connect them to services. Service restriction is the practice of limiting or denying someone access to emergency shelters. This parallel convergent mixed methods study describes the characteristics, healthcare utilization, and morbidity of people experiencing service restrictions in Hamilton, Ontario, and explores the relationship between health and service restriction. Participants’ high healthcare need and utilization was shaped by criminalization, stigma, societal abandonment, and abstinence-based substance use policies.
- Research
Housing is a critical social determinant of health that can be addressed through hospital-supported community benefit programming. Currently, a small subset of hospitals nationally are addressing housing. Hospitals may need additional policy support, external partnerships, and technical assistance to address housing in their communities.
- Research
This rapid review synthesizes evidence about the experiences of users and providers of community-based accommodation services for people living with serious mental illness internationally to understand priorities for policy and practice.
- Research
We mapped the evidence on cancer risk factors as well as barriers and facilitators to cancer prevention services among people experiencing homelessness, which is key to localising research gaps and identifying strategies for tailored interventions adapted to people experiencing homelessness.
- Research
This report reviews and synthesizes evidence examining the association between changes in housing price and health outcomes.
- Research
Lack of awareness of and about homeless youth with intellectual disabilities, combined with siloed ways of working by involved sectors, results in significant disadvantage and health inequities for youth.
- Research
In this commentary, the authors examine a recent application of wastewater surveillance of COVID-19 in a men’s shelter in Toronto.
