Chief of the emergency department at St. Michael’s Hospital in downtown Toronto Dr. Carolyn Snider says that, there’s been a massive increase in the number of homeless individuals taking refuge in emergency departments over the last few winters.
When Dr. Carolyn Snider attains for her early morning emergency room shifts, she often sees about five to ten individuals in the waiting area who actually don’t need medical attention but just needs a safe place to stay warm.
She and her colleagues did some investigations to see if they could quantify what they were seeing.
The resulting study, examined data that had been collected from hospitals across Ontario, documenting ER visits from the winter of 2018-19 through to last winter, ending March 31, 2023.
It concluded that non-urgent emergency department visits among individuals who are homeless raised by 24 per cent across the province over those five winters.
Dr. Stephen Hwang, the study’s senior author and a physician-researcher at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions based at St. Michael’s Hospital said that, they wanted to get this information out right away because they assume that it can help to inform the policy decisions which are being made right now about shelter spaces.
He also mentioned that, when we have high levels of homelessness and not enough shelter beds for individuals, the emergency department is the shelter of last resort since it’s a warming center of last resort.
The health administrative data used for the study came from the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Science, Canadian Institute for Health Information and an Ontario Health Insurance Plan database.
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Since there were no records existing to document whether homeless individuals said that they had come to the emergency department specifically to get warm, the researchers disregarded some other possible reasons which they might have come.
Snider said that, sometimes individuals who are homeless will come into the emergency department and let the staff know that they need help finding shelter. Many people who are homeless arrive at the ER and say they’re concerned about their feet. Sometimes it’s that we need to offer them with some clean and warm socks because they don’t have.
Stephen Gaetz, head of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness based at York University said that, One of the things we need to come to terms with in our response to homelessness is that if we do not provide individuals with access to adequate housing which is affordable, appropriate and safe, as well as necessary supports if they have health and or mental health challenges, then we should not be surprised that people experiencing homelessness are going to make decisions that we may not like.
If we don’t like individuals experiencing homelessness and going to emergency services at hospitals, sleeping in tents or in parks, or sleeping and keeping warm on the subway, then we should prioritize getting people housed.
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Hwang said that longer-term housing solutions are vital, but it’s also important to increase access to safe shelters and warming centers this winter.
We just need to ensure that at a bare minimum, that there are ways for individuals to get out of the cold and not be injured by frostbite or hypothermia and that should not be a chair in the emergency department waiting room.
