“This is unacceptable, this has to change! That’s what I hear from our teams and our community partners! Street nurse for Doctors of the World since 2006, I observe, winter after winter, that the crises are repeated and intensify, without appropriate solutions being put in place.
Posted yesterday at 12:00 p.m.
If the situation was already problematic before the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become critical due to the combination of several factors, such as the crisis in the health system, the outbreak of COVID-19 in homeless shelters, the lack of human resources in all workplaces, the housing crisis, but also the chronic underfunding of community organizations.
I saw so many people leaving too quickly, alone, anonymous. As a society, have we done everything in our power to avoid this tragedy?
We may claim that the places in emergency accommodation are currently sufficient, the reality is that we are not able to put everyone out of danger when necessary.
This is what the Doctors of the World team has observed, working in the streets and in community organizations to provide first-line care, both physical and psychological, to homeless people, for whom access to health care is a journey strewn with pitfalls.
The lack of resources in community organizations that work with homelessness locks people into a survival mode, since they cannot find an answer to their ills. They then focus on their basic needs: getting warm and feeding themselves. The rest takes a back seat, which further compromises their physical and mental health, in the medium and long term.
An outdated system
Everything seems to have moved in the wrong direction. Overflowing shelters and last-minute temporary heat shelters are signs of an outdated system. If they are a solution to deal with the crisis, no one should be satisfied with them. This emergency operation creates enormous pressure on homeless people, but also on the organizations that receive them and their staff.
It is high time that the demonstrations of powerlessness of the workers, who are exhausted and who, despite everything, hold absolutely essential services at arm’s length, were heard. As a humanitarian health organization that works in partnership with community organizations – in particular by offering psychological support services to first-line workers – Médecins du monde is particularly concerned about the current situation in Quebec. However, solutions exist.
Our partners bear witness to this publicly: the current context is the result of actions taken urgently to deal with a situation that is nevertheless foreseeable, while measures aimed at strengthening the organizational capacity of the community sector would undoubtedly have been more effective.
Community intervention should not be treated as an emergency response, but as an essential public policy strategy in supporting and fighting homelessness.
Because it is a major player in the fight against homelessness and because it supports the public health and social services network, the community sector should enjoy greater recognition from public authorities. In fact, the expertise of community organizations in Quebec should be valued more and to do so, it would be necessary to consider financing their mission in the long term, rather than allocating funds to specific and one-off projects. In this way, these organizations would be much better able to contribute to better planning of health and social services in times of crisis.
If homelessness is an extremely complex issue, let’s take up the challenge with multiple and adapted solutions, but also by opting for a preventive rather than a reactive approach. And above all, let’s take into account, from the outset, the expertise of the community sector, and even more so, the experiential knowledge of the people affected by these crisis situations.
Let’s stop repeating the same mistakes: pandemic or not, winter comes back every year!