Mental Health and Wellness of Service Providers Working with People Experiencing Homelessness in Canada: A National Survey from the Second Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: This study examined the scope of common mental health problems and perceived impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic among direct service providers working with people experiencing homelessness in Canada. METHOD: This cross-sectional study used an online survey that was disseminated to homeless service, supportive housing, and harm reduction organizations and networks. Data were collected on depression, anxiety, stress, post-traumatic stress, compassion satisfaction and fatigue, and substance use problems as well as pandemic-related changes in mental health and wellness. A total of 701 service providers completed the survey and were included in data analysis. Descriptive statistics were used to examine the primary research questions, with hierarchical multiple regression models also being fit to explore mental health and wellness differences by occupational service setting. RESULTS: Most direct service providers (79.5%) working with people experiencing homelessness reported a decline in their mental health during the pandemic. There were high rates of common mental health problems within the sample that are largely consistent with those found among health-care workers during the pandemic. Occupational service settings were not associated with the severity of mental health problems, indicating pervasive issues across the workforce, though providers who were younger and spent more time in direct service roles were at greater risk. CONCLUSIONS: The common mental health problems and negative impacts of the pandemic among service providers working with people experiencing homelessness highlight a highly vulnerable workforce that could benefit from improved access to supports. Given the similarities between our findings and other studies examining essential workforces, it is recommended that initiatives that provide accessible mental health care to the health-care workforce during the pandemic be expanded to include homeless and social service providers.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".