The Association of Interpersonal Relationships and Social Services with the Self-Rated Health of Spanish Homelessness

Hassan N, Abu Said AM, Bachik B. Desired support system to eradicate urban homelessness: an exploratory descriptive study

Background - The new increasing homeless lately consist of women, children, youth, the elderly and marginalized ethnic or migrant groups. Some of them are working and earn salaries, however, the income is not sufficient to live modestly. Purpose - The purpose of this research is to establish a desired support system to eradicate urban homelessness in the country. Design/methodology/approach - This is an exploratory descriptive method study which employed quantitative techniques.  The study employed a social ecological model to investigate behavior of homeless via multiple levels of influences including intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational, community and public policy. Surveys have been conducted on sixty-five homeless individuals.  Findings - It was found that support systems and structures should be derived from the whole streams from families, communities, organizations and government. Employment opportunities, long-term shelters within the community places and highly demanded skills are needed to improve their living condition. Research limitations - This study is only focused on the socio-economic structures of the homeless in a capital city. Originality/value - This is an empirical research using a social ecological model for the homeless in the Kuala Lumpur area. Research on homeless study has received little attention and has yet to be fully explored.

Predictors of self-reported general health status in people experiencing homelessness with serious mental illness

PURPOSE

The growing homeless population in the U.S.A. is disproportionately impacted by poor mental and physical health status, including a higher incidence of acute and chronic health problems, increased hospitalizations, and premature mortality compared to the general population. This study examined the association between demographic, social, and clinical factors and perceptions of general health status among the homeless population during admission to an integrated behavioral health treatment program.

METHODS

The study sample included 331 adults experiencing homelessness with a serious mental illness or co-occurring disorder. Participants were enrolled in services at a day program for unsheltered homeless adults, a residential substance use treatment program for males experiencing homelessness, a psychiatric step-down respite program for those experiencing homelessness following psychiatric hospitalization, permanent supportive housing for formerly chronically homeless adults, a faith-based food distribution program, and homeless encampment sites in a large urban area. Participants were interviewed using The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Outcome Measures tool and a validated health-related quality of life measurement tool, SF-36. Data were examined using in elastic net regression.

RESULTS

The study found seven factors to be particularly strong predictors of SF-36 general health scores. Male gender, "other" sexual identity, stimulant use, and Asian race were all associated with better perceptions of health status, while transgender status, inhalant use, and number of times arrested were associated with poorer perceptions.

CONCLUSION

This study suggests targeted areas for health screening within the homeless population; however, more studies are necessary to demonstrate generalizability of the results.

Impact of Socioeconomic Environment on Home Social Care Service Demand and Dependent Users

An aging population and rising life expectancy lead to an increased demand for social services to care for dependent users, among other factors. In Barcelona, home social care (HSC) services are a key agent in meeting this demand. However, demand is not evenly distributed among neighborhoods, and we hypothesized that this can be explained by the user’s social environment. In this work, we describe the user’s environment at a macroscopic level by the socioeconomic features of the neighborhood. This research aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the dependent user’s socioeconomic environment and service needs. We applied descriptive analytics techniques to explore possible patterns linking HSC demand and other features. These methods include principal components analysis (PCA) and hierarchical clustering. The main analysis was made from the obtained boxplots, after these techniques were applied. We found that economic and disability factors, through users’ mean net rent and degree of disability features, are related to the demand for home social care services. This relation is even clearer for the home-based social care services. These findings can be useful to distribute the services among areas by considering more features than the volume of users/population. Moreover, it can become helpful in future steps to develop a management tool to optimize HSC scheduling and staff assignment to improve the cost and quality of service. For future research, we believe that additional and more precise characteristics could provide deeper insights into HSC service demand.