Community Health Promotion With People Who Are Experiencing Homelessness

Above is a high quality pdf version, below is an image of the file:

Health and Homelessness in London: Summary

The full report is available here: Health Services and Homelessness 2011 FINAL

Read it here: Evidence-Based Refinement of Health and Social Services: Exploring the Possibilities of Intravention Research

Abe Oudshoorn – STTI-IO Keynote Presentation from Abe Oudshoorn on Vimeo.

Client-Provider Relationships in a Community Health Clinic for People Experiencing Homelessness: A Critical Ethnography

Abe’s Dissertation Public Presentation

Focus: People who are homeless continue to have the highest rates of morbidity in the Canadian population.  While experiencing the worst health, homeless persons also experience many barriers to healthcare services, with the primary barrier being negative attitudes of health professionals.  Thus seeing the importance of therapeutic relationships, and recognizing that these relationships are framed by policy contexts, we set out to study: 1) How are client-provider relationships enacted within the culture of community care with people who are experiencing homelessness?

Methods: Data were collected in a health outreach project for people who are homeless, in a community health centre, in London, Ontario.  Critical ethnography was the guiding methodology, with multiple methods of document review, participant observation, in-depth interviews and focus groups being utilized.

Findings: In talking to clients and health providers about how they related with each other, they tended to use dichotomous terms of good or bad, ie. good providers or bad providers, good clients or bad clients.  It was noted that policies had much to do with these essentializations, and how clients and providers engaged with or around policies.  However, these local clinic policies were in a large way influenced by broader social and health policies, such as by what is considered ‘health’ and appropriate healthcare spending.  Therefore, although much of the focus was on individual interactions and personal relational traits, what was of far more importance was the policy-framed context in which providers and clients interacted.

Action for Nurses: Therefore, if nurses in this context wanted to truly practice how they knew they should be, they needed to be engaged in altering the policy context that impacted on their workplaces.  This is relevant for all nurses, and serves as a call to political action to enhance our ability to enact best practices.