While Toronto hospitals struggle with broader pressures of the health care system, their ERs are also on the front lines of the mounting homelessness crisis. A new ER outreach team aims to end the cycle that keeps the same people coming through the doors.
When Dan Shaffer turned up at the St. Michael’s Hospital emergency room, it wasn’t for a medical crisis. In his early 70s, Shaffer had been evicted from his apartment and had nowhere else to go.
Hospital staff called the city’s shelter intake line over and over that night. By the next day, they found one room at a north Toronto shelter hotel. Over the ensuing year, as Shaffer feared the remainder of his life would be stuck in the shelter system, a new outreach team from the hospital’s emergency room worked with him to find long-term, stable housing.
When hospital workers call the city’s shelter line, they’re most often told to try again later. Their success rate for finding beds hit a low of less than five per cent in September. While the odds have improved slightly, ER staff — social workers, community support workers, and their new outreach workers — still only secured beds less than 20 per cent of the time in January.
Their work extends well beyond shelter, housing and appointments. Hospital social worker Zahra Tahil rattled through a much longer list of supports they’ve offered, from aid with immigration and settlement services to helping someone entangled in the justice system. After starting to use substances as a teenager, he first sought professional treatment at age 23, but the road since has been rocky. He’d fall back into drinking, and when he drank too much, he’d become angry and get into fights that landed him in jail. His relationship with his family had deteriorated, and he felt friends grow weary of him crashing at their homes.
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