Towards Equitable Health Care Access: Community Participatory Research Exploring Unmet Health Care Needs of Homeless Individuals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Community and health services often overlook health care needs of persons experiencing homelessness, which leads to deterioration in health and increased utilization of emergency services. Since homeless people are underrepresented in health service research, little is known about their unmet health care needs, particularly in smaller cities where resources are limited. This community-based participatory research explored the experiences of small-city homeless service users (HSUs) with unmet health care needs and community service providers (CSPs) who work with them to determine barriers to health care access affecting them. Structured interviews were conducted with 65 HSUs and 15 CSPs in interior British Columbia, Canada. These interviews were audio-recorded, and the retrieved data were analyzed thematically. The three themes uncovered included: a lack of access to health care and risk of stigma, a lack of trust and fear of discrimination, and a need for community navigation and social support. The findings indicate that HSUs do not receive equitable care and face challenges in accessing appropriate and timely foot care, which contributes to increased foot-related emergency visits, loss of trust in the health care system, and disabilities due to worsening foot conditions. Various social determinants of health also impact HSUs, such as low socioeconomic status, lack of housing, decreased social support, unhealthy behaviors, and inequitable access to health services. By collaborating with HSUs, community and health services need to develop innovative outreach programs that provide better community resources as the first step toward equitable access to health care.
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 | 0.022 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| 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".