Nowhere to Go Project

The Nowhere to Go project, funded by Hamilton Community Foundation, uses mixed methods to explore the health status, experiences, and needs of people who are service restricted (temporarily banned) from emergency shelters in Hamilton, ON. Our investigative team, led by Dr. Claire Bodkin, is made up of clinicians, people with lived experience of service restriction, and social workers who worked in the shelter system. The team is finishing the retrospective chart review and defining and naming final themes from the reflexive thematic analysis. Salient themes emerging include: the rules and structure of shelters create a risk environment for people who use drugs; service restrictions force people into encampments, which both cause and exacerbate health problems; and the ubiquitous collaboration of police and health care deters access to health services. Next steps involve integrating the qualitative and quantitative findings to describe meta-inferences from the project and sharing the results via a publicly available report and community town hall.