Housing
Conditions
Keywords
Community organizing, Advocacy
Brief summary
This project will examine whether a health promotion campaign using community organizing and joint advocacy by a coalition of tenants, health providers, social service agencies and advocates can lead to improvements in building conditions and health in social housing.
Detailed description
This community based participatory research project will bring together patients of the St. Michael's Hospital Academic Family Health Team (FHT) who are tenants of Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) with health providers, legal service staff at the Health Justice Program, social service agencies and advocacy organizations to advocate to improve building conditions in three TCHC buildings. The researchers will evaluate the acceptability and feasibility of this health promotion campaign as well as changes in the state of housing and self rated physical and mental health of tenants.
Interventions
BEHAVIORALCommunity Organizing
The intervention will be community organizing and will consist of engaging tenants, health providers, legal service staff, social service agencies and advocacy organizations (e.g. ACORN). Each building team will identify initial priorities and then invite all building members to discuss and to finalize, as well as a plan for change. Building teams will engage in advocacy to TCHC and its representatives, and other city departments as appropriate. Engaging in advocacy will consist of a wide range of activities but essentially means presenting evidence (e.g. personal experiences, data) to policymakers and decision makers to affect change.
Sponsors
Unity Health Toronto
Study design
Allocation
NA
Intervention model
SINGLE_GROUP
Primary purpose
OTHER
Masking
NONE
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
ALL
Age
18 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
Yes
Inclusion criteria
* 18 years or older * Living in one of the three TCHC buildings
Exclusion criteria
* under 18 years old
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Tenant engagement in intervention | 12 months | Acceptability and feasibility of the intervention, assessed through qualitative focus groups with participants in each intervention building. The HEARTH Survey was built by the research team (example question: How satisfied are you with the condition of your building?). All qualitative data will be managed and analyzed with the data management software, NVivo. |
| Building conditions | 12 months | Change in the state of housing evaluated by a questionnaire completed by tenants and official reports from the Toronto Community Housing Corporation. The HEARTH survey consisted of various questions relating to this, leading to different answers due to different scales. For example, for safety of the building, the options were: very safe, fairly safe, neither safe nor unsafe, fairly unsafe, and very unsafe. All scales had 5 options/outcomes but different wordings. No quantitative score was used for this. |
| Health (Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) scale) | 12 months | Change in self-rated physical and mental health, sense of security, social integration, evaluated by surveys of residents using PROMIS scale. This scale is validated. For pain, the minimum score is 0 and the maximum score is 10, with 10 representing the worst pain imaginable. The higher the number on the scale, the worse the outcome/issue is. |
Countries
Canada
Outcome results
None listed