Geriatric Homelessness: Association with Emergency Department Utilization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Homeless adults frequently use emergency departments (EDs), yet previous studies investigating ED utilization by the older segment received little attention. This study sought to characterize older homeless adults who utilized local urban EDs. METHODS: ED encounters at three hospitals in Hamilton (Ont.) were analyzed, and demographic and clinical characteristics of the older homeless (age > 50) vs. younger counterparts (age ≤ 50) were compared during a 24-month period. RESULTS: Of all adults, 1,330 were homeless, of whom 66% were above age 50. Older homeless adults sought less acute care within 30 days from an index visit compared with their younger counterparts. Non-acute illnesses constituted only 18% of triaged cases. Older homeless women with access to a primary care physician (PCP) were 3.3 times more likely to return to ED within 30 days, whereas older homeless men (irrespective of PCP access) were less likely to return to ED. CONCLUSIONS: Despite high homeless patient acuity, a lesser number of ED visits with increasing age remains concerning because of previously reported high morbidity and mortality rates. Access to primary care may not be enough to reduce ED utilization. Further research is needed to evaluate acute care interventions and their effectiveness in ED, and to identify homeless patients requiring more targeted services.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".