Author: Samira Prasad

By Jennifer Stranges, Unity Health Toronto

When Dr. Stephen Hwang joined Unity Health Toronto, he was drawn to the organization’s longstanding commitment to helping those most in need. All three of the network’s hospital sites were founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph, who were called to serve people who are disadvantaged.

“Unity Health has always been dedicated to serving people experiencing homelessness, and it’s always been an area we’ve sought to find innovative ways to provide better care,” he says.

Yet, as Hwang devoted his clinical care and research to caring for people living without permanent shelter, he noticed something else. Not only was the homeless population in Toronto growing in size, the needs of the population were growing as well. Living without shelter puts people at risk of many health challenges, but people who are homeless are also more likely to experience mental health problems and age-related decline. 

Today, caring for people who are unhoused remains a core part of the mission at Unity Health – a value that informs the basis of research, education, outreach and clinical care. The network has also continued to expand its services to meet patients and clients where they are, particularly in the areas of mental health and geriatric care. 

“Our services fill an important need for patients who often fall through the cracks,” says Hwang.

From the Toronto Star article

One of the most “morally upsetting” nights of Maggie Helwig’s life was earlier this winter.

There was a man at Toronto’s Church of Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields, near Bathurst and College Street where she’s the priest and runs a drop-in program, who was “obviously unwell” and “couldn’t even get his socks on properly.”

The shelters were full. The only thing she could do was walk him out to the encampment near the church, wake up some people there, and ask them to take him into their tent for the night.

“It was a very very cold night but the warming centre wasn’t open,” Helwig recalls.

That man this past November was welcomed into someone’s tent. But Helwig said another individual died in a tent over Christmas, when there was a cold alert and warming centres were open, but very busy. The person was not in an encampment community at the time. Their friends are trying to honour their wishes for privacy.

As Hamilton expands access to warming centres, following a public outcry over a Christmas gap in services, advocates are calling for Toronto to do the same, and highlighting that temperatures don’t need to be super cold for people to die on the streets.

As it stands now, warming centres are “generally activated” when an Extreme Cold Weather Alert (ECWA) is issued by Toronto Public Health — when the temperature is forecasted to be -15 C or colder, or -20 with the wind chill — said a city spokesperson in an email.

“There may also be instances when the city decides to open warming centres independent of ECWA “out of an abundance of caution due to colder nighttime temperatures and forecasted wind chill values. For example, warming centres were open and accessible from December 23 at 7 p.m. until noon on December 28,” the spokesperson added.

The city is “aware of unconfirmed reports of the death of a person experiencing homelessness on or about Christmas Eve,” they said.

“The cause of death of people experiencing homelessness, and discovered outside at any time of year, is determined by the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario and only communicated to the next of kin.”

“Toronto used to do a lot more,” said Helwig of warming centres.

“Before the pandemic there actually was a whole network of warming centres all over the city.”

Now there are just three, all walk-ins, and they were “very crowded” over Christmas when they were open during the extreme cold temperatures.

Some of them closed because of the pandemic, some have become part of the 24 hour respite system, but what’s needed is a “low barrier flexible winter space,” she said.

“The need is just growing, and growing in every area all the time.”

The city of Hamilton announced on Wednesday expanded warming centre hours until the end of March, following public pressure.

Dr. Stephen Hwang, director of MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, said his team conducted a study in 2019 that showed about 70 per cent of injuries due to cold happen when the weather is warmer than -15 C.

“I don’t believe there’s evidence to support -15 as being the correct threshold. I suspect that it’s driven more by resource constraints than by anything else,” he said in an interview with the Star. There’s a need for shelter beds. But “on nights where it’s cold, there should be enough warming centres available that people can at least get out of the cold,” he added.

From The Globe and Mail article

Allan Carpenter shuffles into the doctor’s office and gets down to business.

The 65-year-old patient and his long-time physician, Gordon Arbess, have plenty to talk about, even though they see each other for a check-up every second week.

Mr. Carpenter’s back and hip are so sore he worries he’ll end up in a wheelchair. He is anxious about getting to all his medical appointments, including a coming visit with an orthopedic specialist. He’s had HIV since the late 1980s, and he recently beat throat cancer.

“We do have a team of people that are trying to help you,” Dr. Arbess says, soothing his patient’s nerves, “and I know how much you’ve gotten out of it. But I know some days it’s difficult for you to get to these appointments. I get it. I hear you.”

For Canadians without a family doctor, the thought of having a physician guide – a “captain of my ship,” as Mr. Carpenter calls Dr. Arbess – is appealing in itself. But Mr. Carpenter is fortunate to have more than a captain. He has a whole crew.

His clinic east of downtown Toronto is part of the St. Michael’s Hospital Academic Family Health Team, a five-site organization with more than 200 staff, including nurses, dietitians, pharmacists and social workers, as well as clerical staff to support about 80 doctors and 36 medical residents.

This model, which Ontario calls the Family Health Team, is widely considered by health-system experts to be the best way to deliver primary care, especially for patients like Mr. Carpenter with multiple complex medical conditions. Family doctors also favour the team approach because it helps them stave off burnout by sharing the workload. The Canadian Medical Association has named “expanding team-based care” as one of its top recommendations for solving the country’s health care crisis.

Despite that, Ontario hasn’t opened a new Family Health Team in a decade, in part because of the cost.

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Ontario began overhauling its primary-care system in the early 2000s. The new models paid family doctors working in groups mostly for the number of patients they enrolled in their practice, a departure from the traditional fee-for-service approach where doctors are paid for every discrete episode of care they deliver.

The alternative models blended capitation payments – which are annual payments to doctors for every patient on their roster – and fee-for-service to different degrees. The approach was supposed to encourage long-term relationships with patients and give physicians time to deliver comprehensive care to older, sicker patients who might have four or five health concerns to discuss at a single visit.

Doctors had to join one of the new payment models, the most popular of which is called a Family Health Organization, or FHO, if they wanted to be a part of a Family Health Team, or FHT. What set the FHTs apart was that the provincial government paid the salaries of the dietitians, pharmacists, social workers and other health professionals who rounded out the team.

There are currently 181 Family Health Teams in Ontario, the last of which opened in 2012.

In many ways, the reforms succeeded. Doctors flocked to the new patient enrolment models, leading to a 43-per-cent increase between 2006-07 and 2015-16 in the number of Ontarians who said they had a family doctor.

Patient care improved, too, said Tara Kiran, a University of Toronto primary-care researcher and physician at the Family Health Team where Allan Carpenter is a patient. She and her research colleagues found that FHT patients received better diabetes monitoring and visited the emergency department less often than patients at non-team practices, although emergency-department use increased for both groups over time.

From The Conversation, co-authored by Dr. Darrell Tan

One year ago, the United States approved a new injectable drug that prevents HIV.

After successful clinical trials, long-acting cabotegravir was found to be almost 100 per cent effective at preventing HIV. It was approved in the U.S. on Dec. 20, 2021, for use as HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). This approval means that eligible individuals can now receive this medication every eight weeks to prevent sexually-acquired HIV infection.

However this new drug, which would help address some of the ongoing challenges with HIV prevention for those who remain at high risk, is still not available in Canada.

HIV in Canada

The number of new HIV infections has not changed much over the past couple of decades and approximately 13 per cent of people living with HIV in Canada are undiagnosed. This demonstrates the need for more HIV prevention strategies.

While long-acting injectable PrEP is new, oral PrEP — a pill taken either daily or around sexual activity — was approved in the U.S. back in 2012. Canada only approved oral PrEP in 2016. And we are once again falling behind the U.S. on making injectable PrEP available here.

Oral PrEP already reduces the risk of HIV by almost 100 per cent when taken consistently, but recent clinical trials show that injectable PrEP is even more effective. The main advantage of injectable PrEP is that going for injections every two months is a lot easier to remember than taking pills every day, or taking pills before and after sexual activity. The switch from oral pills to injectable shots means that individuals can more easily maintain adherence, which impacts the overall effectiveness of PrEP as HIV prevention.

From CBC Toronto

Virtual-care clinics may be adding pressure to the overwhelmed health-care system, the Ontario Medical Association said Thursday, even as some patients and doctors say they are vital alternatives to an otherwise necessary visit to an emergency room.

The OMA comments come as pediatric hospitals, emergency departments and the overall health-care system are struggling to meet the demands of a triple-threat of respiratory syncytial virus, the seasonal flu and COVID-19.

“Virtual-only walk-in clinics may actually be resulting in more churn, more cost to our system,” said Dr. Tara Kiran, a family physician at Toronto’s St. Michael Hospital and senior author of a preliminary study that compared patients who visited their own family doctors virtually with people who visited a virtual-only clinic.

The preprint study, which has not been peer reviewed, found that virtual walk-in patients are twice as likely to visit an emergency department within 30 days due to a lack of continuity of care.

However, some patients and doctors are lamenting a reduction in virtual care options as doctors leave the platforms after the province and the OMA reached an agreement to reduce fees paid to doctors for virtual visits, effective Dec. 1.

From the CBC article

According to the Ontario College of Family Physicians, 1.8 million residents in the province don’t have a family doctor — a number it says could reach three million by 2025 if current trends persist. 

About 1.7 million people have a physician over the age of 65, said Dr. Jobin Varughese, the college’s president-elect 

“So, unfortunately, as tragic as it is to say ‘Thank you for all of your service, but continue to work,’ [even older doctors like Dr. Bell] may become a little bit more common than one or two cases,” Varughese said. 

Dr. Tara Kiran, a family doctor and researcher at St. Michael’s Hospital, which is part of the Unity Health Toronto network, said there is a worrying trend of fewer Ontario medical students choosing to enter family practice, and there are several potential reasons why. 

Those include a fear of working alone at clinics not staffed by teams, lower pay and perceived stature, and a significant amount of time spent on paperwork instead of interacting with patients. 

“The paperwork in primary care is horrendous,” Bell said. “Wednesday is a day off, but [they] tend to be paperwork days.”

Bell and Kiran also cite a backlog in medical services created by the COVID-19 pandemic, which puts “a huge increase in pressure on us,” he said.

Kiran co-authored a recent study showing many family doctors retired early in the pandemic, whereas Bell says he’ll stay on at the Sharbot Lake clinic until they find the right person to replace him. 

“Well, kudos to Dr. Bell for his commitment to his practice and to the town,” Kiran said, adding it’s not uncommon for some family doctors to work into their old age. 

“It’s a profession that we train a long time for and it becomes a big part of our identity.”

From CityNews

Every night in Toronto, an average of 187 people seeking warmth and safety are turned away from the shelter system, raising renewed concerns about how the City will help its most vulnerable residents trying to survive the winter outdoors.

“We personally see people every day in our emergency department and in our hospital wards who are homeless and for whom we can’t find a shelter bed for,” said Dr. Stephen Hwang with the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital.

He told CityNews a rising number of people are turning up at the already overcrowded emergency department, not because they have a medical problem but simply because they need a place to get out of the cold.

Hwang, whose research focuses on ending homelessness and improving the health of those who live outside, said social workers will spend hours calling the City’s central intake office to find spots inside shelters. But very few leave the emergency department with somewhere to go.

“I’m afraid we’re going to see people dying from hypothermia, literally freezing to death on the street,” Hwang said.

According to the City, the shelter system is currently accommodating approximately 8,200 people nightly. That’s 1,600 more than this time last year, and more than they’ve ever had.

At the same time, the City is closing temporary shelter sites opened during the pandemic. Some residents at the Novotel allege they were evicted last month as the City prepares to close the leased hotel by the end of the year. The move impacts 251 unhoused people.

As Hwang explained, people are in encampments because there is not enough safe shelter space for them.

While the City vows outreach staff hand out blankets, sleeping bags and warm clothing in the wintertime, people are not offered safer alternatives to propane heat, raising the risk of frostbite or the danger of fire.

From the National Observer article

When unhoused people in Toronto run out of options, they turn to the city’s overcrowded emergency departments for shelter.

The result is a collision of two crises, emergency department overcrowding and homelessness, that will risk lives, physicians, social workers and advocates for unhoused people say.

“We are going to see higher rates of people dying and more severe health impacts. For example, people are going to experience frostbite and people are going to have more amputations,” said Jesse Jenkinson, a postdoctoral fellow at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital’s Li Ka Shing Institute.

Emergency department overcrowding is at a critical level, according to experts. A wave of respiratory illnesses, including COVID-19, has swamped ERs already struggling with hospital bed-block and nursing shortages. At the same time, the city is closing temporary hotel shelters opened during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic to aid social distancing.

Some of the hotel occupants are being placed in permanent housing. But others are left to join the shelter bed queue and when those are full, some turn to emergency departments to stay warm. The triad of too little affordable housing and too few temporary shelter spaces and social services further adds to the strain.

Sylvia Gomes, an emergency department social worker at the University Health Network’s Toronto Western Hospital, along with her colleagues have been sounding the alarm since August.

People without homes come to the ER for shelter and warmth, but when social workers try to help them, there are no shelter beds available, she said.

“We are having tremendous difficulty in the emergency department supporting unhoused people and in ensuring that they leave to a place where they are warm and safe,” said Dr. Aaron Orkin, an emergency physician at St. Joseph’s Hospital and the population health director for Inner City Health Associates.

Shelter beds are allocated through a 24/7 city-operated telephone-based service that refers people to dormitory-style congregate shelters and other overnight accommodations. Congregate shelters sleep up to 20 people per room.

City data shows the number of calls to central intake continues to climb. In January, there were 411 calls to central intake; the numbers mounted to 749 in October.

The data also shows that in October, an average of 186 unhoused people per day went unmatched. This is almost eight times the rate in October 2021 rates. Gomes believes that’s a conservative estimate. Many people don’t call because they can’t tolerate the conditions in congregate shelters or have given up because they know they won’t find a spot.

Between January and October, 3,418 people were moved out of the shelter system to permanent housing, according to an email from the City of Toronto’s Shelter, Support and Housing Administration (SSHA).

Despite that, there is a rising demand for shelter beds, said Milton Barrera, project director of homelessness initiatives and prevention services at SSHA. “People are getting evicted from their rentals,” he said. “There are also more refugees.”

According to a November briefing by Gordon Tanner, SSHA general manager, 27 per cent of those currently in shelters are refugees, with 60 to 90 new people accessing the shelter system each week.

Meanwhile, the city is continuing to relocate people from the temporary hotel shelter beds that housed 2,500 people, sleeping one or two per room. Two sites with about 225 residents closed in the spring, another site with 250 beds will shutter by the end of this month and one is being converted to permanent affordable and supportive homes.

The SSHA’s stated goal is to find permanent housing for all former hotel residents, but Barrera admits there is not enough to go around.

According to city data, at one site alone, 251 people are losing their temporary hotel rooms and it is projected only 48 will find permanent housing. The remaining 203 will be out on the street and forced to seek shelter elsewhere.

Not all of the hotel bed closures are within the city’s control, according to Dr. Stephen Hwang, an internal medicine physician at St. Michael’s Hospital and the director of the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions. “Many owners are not willing to renew their leases,” he said. Most signed leases with the city during the pandemic when hotel occupancy was low and are now resuming their pre-pandemic businesses.

By Marlene Leung, Unity Health Toronto

In an office in downtown Toronto, a dedicated team of Unity Health researchers is using math to tackle some of the world’s most pressing health problems, including COVID-19, Ebola, HIV and human mpox (monkeypox).

The Research Group in Mathematical Modeling and Program Science develops and uses math models to better understand, analyze and predict epidemics. Housed within the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions and led by principal investigator Dr. Sharmistha Mishra, the lab includes data scientists, mathematical modelers, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, graduate students and research associates. Together, they use math and data to understand the factors driving infectious disease transmission in the hopes of helping to craft more tailored, impactful solutions.

Grounding the lab is a deep commitment to public health, equity and scientific inquiry, says Mishra, who is also a MAP scientist and infectious disease physician at Unity Health. This means taking nothing for granted about viruses, human behavior, and the structural factors that could be fueling disease transmission, she said.

“Our models are really part of the science that serves communities… we approach our modeling with that lens,” she said. “We challenge and interrogate assumptions that go into what we think we understand about epidemics.”

From the Toronto Star article

A fiery explosion beneath a Toronto bridge, which burned hot under the nighttime sky after propane tanks left in an encampment burst, is raising fears about how to keep the city’s homeless population safely warm this winter — particularly amid a growing squeeze on the shelter system.

The explosion took place late Saturday on Nov. 26. Officials didn’t know how the fire started, describing the setting as an empty encampment. No known injuries were sustained, and though transportation officers were dispatched to be sure, the bridge didn’t appear to suffer damage.

But the fiery scene illustrates a looming tension in Toronto. When winter sets in, those facing homelessness outdoors find ways to stay warm and stave off frostbite, in many cases involving propane heat that city and fire officials have labelled as dangerous. Those officials have urged people to come inside instead — but this year, that’s an especially tough task, with more than 180 people on average turned away each day in October after calling the shelter intake line.

And while a coroner’s inquest years ago recommended the city offer people safer heating sources in the wintertime — as a way to prevent death — it’s a suggestion that hasn’t been heeded.

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When people try to survive the winter outdoors, they often turns up in the St. Michael’s Hospital emergency room. Last winter, hospital staff reported a rising number of people arriving in search of shelter and help for cold-weather injuries. At least one person died of hypothermia.

“Every time someone dies of hypothermia, it’s unnecessary,” said Dr. Carolyn Snider, the hospital’s chief of emergency medicine. She suggested more advanced planning for when warming centres open based on forecasts of extreme weather, to give those staying on Toronto’s streets more notice. While the ER tries its best to hand out wool socks, hats, gloves and jackets to patients staying outdoors, she said places to properly warm up were critical.