Homelessness, health and the policy process: A literature review

Brendan Clifford, Andrew Wilson and Patrick Harris

Health Policy, 2019, vol. 123, issue 11, 1125-1132

Abstract: Homelessness has serious consequences for the health of people experiencing homelessness, and presents a challenge to the provision of quality care by health services. Policymaking to address homelessness, as with other social determinants of health (SDH), is complicated by issues of complex causation, intersectoral working and the dominance of biomedicine within health policy. This paper investigates how policies addressing homelessness have been explored using formal policy process theories (PPT). It also examines how health (as an actor and an idea) has intersected with the issue of homelessness reaching policy agendas and in policy implementation. A systematised search of academic databases for peer-reviewed literature from 1986 to 2018 identified six studies of homelessness policy change from Australia, Canada, France and the United States. PPT were able to articulate the interplay of actors, ideas and structures in homelessness policymaking. When the health sector was involved, it tended to be in terms of healthcare service utilisation rather than a broader public health framework emphasising structural social determinants of homelessness. Tensions between differing the priorities of local homelessness actors and a biomedical evidence-based policy paradigm were noted. Future policy action on homelessness requires new models of intersectoral governance that account for the complexity of health determinants, a health workforce enabled to engage with the SDH, and meaningful inclusion of those with lived and living experience of homelessness in policy formulation.

Keywords: Homelessness; Political science; Policy process; Intersectoral working; Social determinants of health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168851019302015
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:hepoli:v:123:y:2019:i:11:p:1125-1132

DOI: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2019.08.011

Access Statistics for this article

Health Policy is currently edited by Katrien Kesteloot, Mia Defever and Irina Cleemput

More articles in Health Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu () and ().