Nowhere to Go: A parallel convergent mixed methods study examining the health of people who experience emergency shelter service restrictions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Emergency shelters offer temporary sleeping accommodation to people deprived of housing and connect them to services. Service restriction is the practice of limiting or denying someone access to emergency shelters. This parallel convergent mixed methods study describes the characteristics, healthcare utilization, and morbidity of people experiencing service restrictions in Hamilton, Ontario, and explores the relationship between health and service restriction. Methods We recruited 20 people who had experienced service restriction and accessed healthcare from the Shelter Health Network clinic. We conducted semi-structured interviews and performed reflexive thematic analysis. We reviewed participants’ medical records from January 1, 2018 to December 31, 2021 to calculate simple descriptive statistics. Mixing our qualitative and quantitative results, we generated narrative metainferences. We employed community-based research principles, including a research team with lived and living experiences of being service restricted, implementing service restrictions, or providing care to people experiencing service restrictions. Results We generated six themes: 1) Losing your home shouldn’t mean losing your humanity, 2) Where am I supposed to go?, 3) The snakes and ladders of service restrictions, 4) Abandoned to survive, 5) Constantly criminalized, 6) Harnessing the wisdom of community. Participants averaged 17.4 primary care visits, 11 emergency department visits, and 4 hospital admissions over 4 years. The most common reasons for visit were infections, traumatic injuries, and substance use-related concerns. Narrative metainferences highlighted how people experience dehumanization when accessing shelters or healthcare; how service restrictions and encampment living contribute to infections; the lack of practical supports for people using substances in shelters; the ubiquitous criminalization of people experiencing homelessness; and the care people practice for one another to reduce substance-related harms. Conclusions Participants’ high healthcare need and utilization was shaped by criminalization, stigma, societal abandonment, and abstinence-based substance use policies. Participants practiced care for themselves and others to navigate these barriers. Shelters should have a transparent service restriction process and employ harm reduction practices. Healthcare should provide affirming and accessible treatment for common conditions. Social and health services must contend with broader social forces while building on the strengths of people with lived experience to improve the health of people who are service restricted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.043 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".