Thank you so much, honourable member Sidhu. I can definitely talk about the link there.
First and foremost, in homelessness, the population itself is not ubiquitous; they're very diverse in who they are. As Dr. Patel mentioned, while one treatment might work for one population in one group, it might not work for another.
It's a difficult thing to manage because you have different levels of acuity in that circumstance as well. What I mean by this is that you have new people entering homelessness who are not chronically homeless yet. They are traditionally easier to get back into the housing system than others. These are people escaping domestic violence issues or who had their house burn down, for instance—situations like that. There are also youth experiencing homelessness, which is a different category or group.
In terms of chronic homelessness, one of the big things we see within this particular population is a large number of mental health concerns and a large amount of substance use, as Dr. Patel mentioned. However, there's also a large amount of brain injury. For that population in particular, this is one of the main concerns we have. We see this within various downtown cores throughout the country.
I'm an internist as well. At the University of Alberta Hospital, for instance, I often manage individuals who have a traumatic brain injury from a motor vehicle accident. I sometimes have patients with frontal temporal lobe dementia, and the behaviours they enact are no different from those of individuals I saw and took care of in the shelter at the Calgary Drop-In Centre when I was working there, or in our opioid dependency program, which is above our supervised consumption site. It's a very similar population. The only difference is that within the acute hospital setting, people with frontal temporal lobe dementia have families that are very supportive of them. We get them into long-term care facilities or housing, whereas with this particular population, we don't.
I want to highlight that systematic reviews have been done demonstrating that among the population experiencing homelessness, nearly 50% have moderate to severe brain injuries or moderate to severe cognition concerns. That is huge, yet we don't provide proper support for them.