OT's Mental Health Response to the COVID Pandemic: Persons Experiencing Homelessness

Editor’s note: This text-based course is a transcript of the webinar, OT's Mental Health Response to the COVID Pandemic: Persons Experiencing Homelessness, presented by Caitlin Synovec, OTD OTR/L, BCMH.Learning OutcomesAfter this course, participants will be able to identify the impact of Covid-19 on persons experiencing homelessness.After this course, participants will be able to identify the role of occupational therapy in addressing the impact of Covid-19 on occupational performance in persons experiencing homelessness.After this course, participants will be able to identify strategies and/or resources to address the needs of persons experiencing homelessness in response to Covid-19.Thank you, everyone. And welcome to today's presentation on OT's mental health response and persons experiencing homelessness. So these are my disclosures for today's presentation. And these are our learning outcomes that will be covered in today's session. So hopefully, after this course concludes, those participating will be able to identify the impact of COVID-19 on persons experiencing homelessness. Participants will be able to identify the roles of occupational therapy in addressing the impact of COVID-19 on occupational performance in persons experiencing homelessness, and, finally, identify strategies and/or resources to address the needs of persons experiencing homelessness, specifically in response to COVID-19. So Christine already gave the brief introduction about my history, background, and work. I was lucky enough in this particular presentation to be able to engage with a consumer located in New York city. So I'm going to... So you'll see his videos throughout this presentation, and here's his introduction.- Okay, so my name is Shams. Most people refer to me as Shams DeBaron, but in this context of my advocacy dealing with the homeless issues, I'm referred to also as Da Homeless Hero.- And you can actually follow Shams and his story on social media, which is listed down at the bottom here. And his experience is drawn from his experience of living in a congregate men's shelter in New York City. And he is also a client of the Project Renewal program.- Okay.- So when we're looking at COVID-19 and the impact on persons experiencing homelessness, COVID-19 has obviously impacted all of us in a lot of different ways, but there are specific and really certain impacts that have happened for people who are homeless. One of those is that if you're living in congregate and shelter facilities, there's a limited ability to follow social distancing guidelines. And this was especially the case at the beginning of the pandemic, before there was more global knowledge about prevention efforts and mitigating the effects of COVID-19, especially for those living in these settings. People who are experiencing homelessness often more frequently need to occupy public spaces, which could have been shut down, or because they are public, out in the open, made them more at risk for contracting COVID-19 because there wasn't a safe and private place to be. Additionally, persons experiencing homelessness have really complex co-morbidities that impact their health. So in addition to a high prevalence of serious mental illness and substance use, often folks experiencing homelessness also experience chronic conditions such as diabetes and respiratory conditions, both of which we know can impact how a person responds if they contract COVID-19. And linked to that is that persons experiencing homelessness have limited access to regular and preventative health services. So not only are they more likely to have these conditions than the general population, but they are less likely to be receiving care, or adequate or quality care for these conditions, which means that they may be worse and, again, really exacerbating the impact of COVID-19. And finally, if we can all think back to March, the limited access to supplies that sort of was pervasive in a lot of communities in terms of soap and sanitizer and toilet paper, think of the impact of that on folks who really are unable to access those resources at baseline. And so it made it even harder to get some of the things that they needed for basic self-care. Where were you staying before COVID-19 came to the US? Kind of before all of that, the lockdown and stuff started in March, where had you been staying prior to that?- I was in the congregate shelter under Project Renewal. In New York city, the congregate shelter is at Bowery and 3rd Street. Mine's was on by Bowery. They have another facility on 3rd Street, so it's a congregate shelter where you might have 30 people to a floor in a dorm-style setting, which-- Okay, so it's kind of like the open rooms, shared space, shared bathroom, all of that kind of thing. Okay. Okay.- Prior to that, we've had other viruses that didn't really, it didn't take on life like this one did. So yeah, we had to be concerned, or certain type of facilities you had to look out for, like in NYCHA buildings and stuff like that, schools and stuff, but those were the things that were isolated to certain areas and stuff like that. So there was no real alarm initially. But when it first hit the United States, as far as people would acknowledging like, oh, wait a minute, we have a problem, and remember, all of this time, there was a lot of, I don't think the proper term is misinformation, but there was a lack of real knowledge about these things. So we were all being misinformed because nobody actually had the right information. So we were in the same situation. We watched the news every morning. That's just something we do before we go about our day. So we're seeing stuff but not really understanding if this is something that we should be concerned with, the initial days. But when it got to the point where it's like, okay, it's here, and we've got a case here, and this thing may spread, and then it still was information indicating that we didn't have cause for alarm. But we're looking like-- Wait a minute.- Wait a minute. Why not, if it seems...