New project will track all homeless deaths in city
Outreach workers say initiative, launching Jan. 1, is ‘long overdue’
In a change that anti-poverty activists are calling “long overdue,” Toronto Public Health will work with about 200 community agencies to confirm the deaths of homeless people that occur across the city.
Beginning Jan. 1, the initiative will expand reporting to include homeless deaths outside Toronto’s shelter system. Currently, the city records only shelter-related deaths — people who die in city-administered shelters or shortly after leaving one. There have been 247 such deaths since 2007.
Bolstering the efforts of Toronto Public Health and participating agencies, the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario says it will confirm the death of a homeless person if it is aware of that detail, although a notification process has not been finalized.
The start date for the project comes 10 months after a Star investigation found that the province and most Ontario municipalities do not track homeless deaths fully, or at all.
In April, prompted by the Star’s findings, city council passed a motion directing staff to collect all data related to homeless deaths and for this information to be shared with public agencies and the provincial government.
“I am happy to finally see progress being made on this initiative,” said Scarborough East Councillor Paul Ainslie, who tabled the motion at Toronto council. “It has been too long coming into existence.
“The expanded monitoring system will provide information everyone can use to raise awareness of these tragic deaths and respond with appropriate strategies.”
As part of the tracking system, To- ronto Public Health has asked roughly 200 community partners, such as drop-in centres, churches, needle exchanges, Toronto police and hospitals, to submit data on deaths they are aware of. The data could include date and time of death, location and cause, according to Paul Fleiszer, manager of the surveillance and epidemiology unit at Toronto Public Health.
“The new initiative will capture deaths that occur (of ) homeless people who are not in city-run shelters,” Fleiszer wrote in an email. “They may have been living at shelters run by agencies other than the city, at a friend’s place, or on the street.”
The research will be summarized and publicly reported, he noted.
“This kind of evidence can help us measure how well we are responding to the problem and to identify whether additional efforts are needed to reduce what is an important health inequity in Toronto,” Fleiszer said. “At the same time, the data will help to acknowledge those individuals who have died after living in what are, for most of us, unimaginable and dire circumstances.”
Calls to comprehensively track homeless deaths in Toronto and across Ontario go back 30 years. The recommendation has been made by Toronto city councillors, social workers, affordable housing advocates and a coroner’s inquest jury, among others.
In 1999, the city of Toronto worked with the Ontario coroner’s office to count homeless deaths in the GTA in the TIDE (Toronto Indigent Death Enquiry) program. It lasted until 2005, ending because of a lack of “resources.”
The coroner’s office used to record whether people who died were homeless, but the practice stopped in 2007 because such labels were considered “unreliable.”
The Star’s investigation, published in February, also found that the coroner has no mandate to track all homeless deaths in the province and there is no central provincial registry to which hospitals, social agencies and shelters can report such deaths.
Toronto street nurse Cathy Crowe, who has long called for an official tracking of homeless deaths, says she is relieved the city has stepped up to take on the task that is “long overdue.”
Crowe is one of several outreach workers who voluntarily maintain the Toronto Homeless Memorial, an unofficial list of homeless people in the GTA who have died.
The memorial, posted outside the Church of the Holy Trinity just west of the Eaton Centre, dates to the mid-1980s and has more than 800 names on it.
“For many of us it’s been a morbid experience tracking homeless deaths,” she said. “I began it as a very young street nurse, when sitting on a pew at a funeral, I realized I was going to way too many funerals for a community nurse.
“My death files became my largest file folder — larger than diabetes or tuberculosis or bedbugs.”
Last month, in another development stemming from the Star’s investigation, the coroner’s office announced it will hold an inquest into the deaths of two men, Brad Chapman and Grant Faulkner. The Star wrote about Chapman when he died in hospital of a drug overdose in August 2015 after collapsing in a doorway near Yonge and Gerrard Sts. The coroner is aiming to begin its inquest by the end of 2017.