SASKATOON -- Advocates say Canada should learn from San Francisco’s approach in allowing homeless people to voluntarily quarantine in repurposed hotels, which includes providing them with behavioural health support.
The city’s hotel-based quarantine program -- which offers rooms, as well as medical care and behavioural health support for two weeks -- was safe and highly effective at reducing the spread of COVID-19 in the community, according to a new U.S. study.
The findings, published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open last week, noted how 81 per cent of people completed their quarantine, with only four per cent of those who’d been moved there from the hospital needing to be readmitted due to COVID-19 complications.
“What it shows is that if we don’t house people who are homeless, we often end up paying for the cost elsewhere and one of the most common places is within the health care system,” Dr. Stephen Hwang, the director of MAP Centre for Urban Health Solution at St. Michael's Unity Health Toronto, told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview.
He said the approach prevented unnecessary hospitalizations and the new research bolstered public health officials’ general idea of allowing people with no fixed address to isolate in repurposed hotels in cities, which has be done in some Canadian cities, such as Calgary and Vancouver.
Hwang, a leading researcher in homelessness and housing who was not involved in the study, said those who were readmitted to hospital were more likely readmitted for “behavioural, mental health or addiction needs, rather than because they had worsening COVID.”
He said this finding echoed what he saw in similar programs in Toronto.
CANADA HAS A LOT TO LEARN FROM STUDY: LAWYER
Anna Cooper, a staff lawyer for Pivot Legal, a B.C.-based advocacy group focused on communities affected by poverty and social exclusion, also praised San Francisco’s approach to homeless populations.
“I think it’s really noteworthy the number of supports that they’re providing. They’re providing storage, they’re providing support for people who have kids, they’re providing alcohol maintenance programs,” she told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview.
Cooper focuses on addressing homelessness and specializes in criminal defence and mental health law.
“They did a lot to ensure that it wasn’t just: ‘Hey, you can stay in this room for two weeks.’ And I think there is some wisdom in that. If you actually want to help people, you actually have to help them holistically,” she said.
She noted a lot could be gleaned from the study for Vancouver and other Canadian cities with similar hotel-based quarantine programs for homeless people.
“There was a theme throughout this study, which I feel at times I have seen in lacking in [the Canadian] government approach, is taking responsibility of when people leave your program,” she said.
Cooper appreciated how researchers took responsibility for not building enough trust in people when they left early.
“If the program or the housing, if the resource you created, isn’t being used, that doesn’t mean people are help-resistant, it means your program is not meeting their needs,” she said, noting the U.S. program was also available to people living in communal housing buildings.
“We don’t currently discuss or acknowledge that those folks are fundamentally under-housed,” she said of buildings in her province of British Columbia. “Anybody who works in this field that a ton of our low-income housing is widely inadequate.”
She ultimately praised how a big theme in the study was that “housing is health care.”
Hwang echoed that sentiment and noted that as more people in Canada become vaccinated, public health officials should consider the use of quarantine hotels for homeless populations after the pandemic is over.
“We can we move from responding to crisis and end chronic homelessness permanently by providing people with the housing and supports that they need, rather than going back to the way things were,” he said.
