Health Services

Q: What is the single most important predictor of how healthy you will be in your life? Your inherited genes? Whether you drink or smoke? Life Circumstances?

Maybe you’d be surprised to find out that the correct answer is Life Circumstances. Research shows that life circumstances such as poverty have the greatest impact on health.

“While one of the world’s biggest spenders in healthcare, we have one of the worst records in providing an effective social safety net. What good does it do to treat people’s illnesses, to then send them back to the conditions that made them sick?” (Former Minister of Health and Welfare Monique Bégin, in Social Determinants of Health: The Canadian Facts, by Juha Mikkonen and Dennis Raphael, May 2010 )

Fred Victor’s tenants, residents and the people who use our programs often experience very poor health.  All of the illnesses below are directly related to poverty and the chronic instability and stress of homelessness:

• premature aging (heart disease, stroke, diabetes)
• severe mental confusion due to inadequate or incorrect medication
• post-traumatic stress disorder
• ill-health due to addictions, and
• preventable communicable diseases

CDSS
Harm-Reduction

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