The experience of homelessness not only affects physical health, but can also constrain access to required health care. In a number of European countries, national strategies to tackle homelessness have sought to deliver integrated solutions across housing, health and other social policy areas. This article examines approaches to meeting the health care needs of homeless people in relation to s...

Aboriginal women have higher rates of homelessness than non-Aboriginal women and they are overrepresented in the prison population. Those who are homeless are at increased risk for incarceration; equally, those just released from prison are particularly vulnerable to homelessness. In this paper we review the historical context and the literature on homelessness and incarceration among Aborigina...

Recent national reports suggest that nearly 1,000,000 families with children experience homelessness and that this number is rising (National Center on Family Homelessness, 2009; U.S. Conference of Mayors, 2010; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2011). Families experiencing homelessness are disproportionately more likely to have experienced economic, health, and social risk fact...

OBJECTIVE This study examined the potential impact of a proposed change to the official federal definition of chronic homelessness. METHODS Using administrative data from the emergency shelters in a large U.S. city, this study estimated the number of persons identified as chronically homeless under the current definition of chronic homelessness, a proposed new federal definition, and two alte...

Becoming homeless is a convergence of many individual vulnerabilities and structural factors. Homelessness has serious implications for the health of individuals and populations [1]. In the North American context, and globally the majority of people who are homeless are men (71%); when women are homeless they are more likely to be homeless with children [2,3]. In recent years, the number of Can...

BACKGROUND Reports linking the deinstitutionalisation of psychiatric care with homelessness and imprisonment have been published widely. AIMS To identify cohort studies that followed up or traced back long-term psychiatric hospital residents who had been discharged as a consequence of deinstitutionalisation. METHOD A broad search strategy was used and 9435 titles and abstracts were screened...

BACKGROUND It is increasingly acknowledged that homelessness is a more complex social and public health phenomenon than the absence of a place to live. This view signifies a paradigm shift, from the definition of homelessness in terms of the absence of permanent accommodation, with its focus on pathways out of homelessness through the acquisition and maintenance of permanent housing, to underst...

Residential mobility among those with mental disorders is consistently associated with hospital admission. We studied 4485 psychiatric admissions in South London, aiming to describe the prevalence, timing and associations of residential moves occurring in association with admission. Moves tended to cluster around discharge; 15% of inpatients moved during admission or up to 28 days after dischar...

This article describes the problem of homelessness in Japan, and contrasts the status of the problem between the United Kingdom and Japan. Demographic characteristics of the homeless, including age and gender, vary across the two countries (for example, there are very few homeless women in Japan). Factors contributing to the development of homelessness in each country are discussed and contrast...

Whilst data on statutory homelessness is well recorded in the UK, there is a lack of data on informal homelessness (such as ‘sofa surfing’) and rough sleeping, other than that which relies on partial information and street counts. This paper presents findings from a recent online survey of young people and helps to fill this gap. It found that rates of sofa surfing and rough sleeping among youn...