Human Resources Committee on May 11th, 2009

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Thank you very much.

My first question is to Patti and Sharon around some of the health issues and healthy living suggestions you may have. Obviously, this is a huge strain. A huge component of poverty is the unhealthy lifestyle choices people make, and I wonder if you could just give us some comments for the record on some of the issues you've seen here locally as far as health issues go and just some programs or some ideas around the healthy living, healthy food choices, to kind of combat some of the components of poverty.

[Patti Melanson]

Chronic illness is certainly higher among those who are homeless than those who are housed, especially diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which seem to be the two top chronic disease issues that are faced predominately within the homeless population as people age.

Being chronically homeless—and what I mean by that is that you've been homeless for years at a time, maybe having housing through short intervals—also puts a great deal of stress and strain on the mental health of an individual. So that's often identified.

Injury and assaults are also predominant within this population. They experience injury and assaults within the community itself, they experience assaults or are beaten by people who are using them and seeing them as targets, and they certainly experience assaults by law enforcement. So that's certainly an issue that is higher among the homeless population.

The issues around addiction are higher in that population also.

With all of that comes a great deal of judgment. So people who have been assaulted sometimes don't seek care because there's a perception within themselves that they deserved that. People don't go for care because of some of the things I had mentioned before—some of the discrimination they experience from health care providers around having not been able to shower or not having been able to get food for the last couple of days. So they have experienced, certainly, that type of discrimination.

I think that's what you were just looking for, right? Just some of the health concerns that are experienced by.... Does that feel sufficient?

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Yes, and just further about some of the actual programs or programming you've found successful so far.

[Patti Melanson]

Phoenix Youth Programs for the last number of years, at least nine, hired a nurse, and I had that position for a number of years. I think that offering health care where people are is a very effective way of managing and helping people enter into a journey of self-care. The mobile outreach street health program is even more of an extension of that type of service, in that it will actually go to all of the shelters, everywhere where food is served; it will have a street presence; it will hopefully be able to offer health care to people who are not being served by the traditional medical system right now. We shouldn't accept that people receive health care out of a moving vehicle; that doesn't feel okay to me. But what feels okay is that it's an initiation of health care for people. Hopefully the domino effect of that is that we educate other health care providers around their ways of working with people, and it will encourage people to access health care in the way you or I would.

Accessibility is huge, and we have to be conscious of how that looks. That doesn't always need to look like going to where somebody is. Accessibility is about creating shifts in people and making them more accessible to an individual, just in the way that they offer their care.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Do I have a few minutes left?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

You have a few seconds left.

Ms. Lawlor, go ahead.

[Sharon Lawlor]

A program that was initiated last year out of the North End Community Health Centre was started by our dietician, whose emphasis was on capacity-building, specializing in youth in the community. She initiated the development of a community garden. In partnership with other programs in the area, other agencies, and using the youth through support from the Black Business Initiative they were able to get them to go through a week's training project for entrepreneurial and leadership skills to grow a garden and yield the produce from the garden to produce salsa, for example. These are youth from nine to nineteen, I believe. They sold the salsa in the community, and used that as a capacity-building example of creating profits from your own initiative and learning all aspects of gardening. That has expanded throughout the community this year. She has umpteen people. The plots are being expanded by other groups who are going to grow vegetables and produce in those plots.

That's an inner city area where the dietician is teaching people how to eat on a budget, and produce, starting with youth all the way up. That's only one of her programs.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

That's all the time we have.

I want to once again thank the witnesses for being here, not only for taking time out of your schedules, as we've all said, but also for all the hard work you do on the front lines. Thank you very much.

This part of the meeting is adjourned.