Constant crisis management: service provider perspectives on adapting homeless resources for people who use drugs and alcohol

Homeless service providers in Montreal, Canada face increasingly challenging circumstances in delivering services to people who use drugs and alcohol experiencing homelessness. While this group continues to be overrepresented in homeless counts and conditions to their sustainable exit to homelessness continue to be difficult, this research asks, 1) What are the limitations of the current service provision in Montreal for addressing the needs of homeless substance users? How can services be adapted?; and 2) Which larger societal conditions create barriers for homeless individuals who use drugs and alcohol to access services? Drawing on 10 semi-structured interviews with staff of homeless service providers, this research uses a trauma-informed spaces of care framework to examine the relationship between people, place, and care, with the added variable of trauma. Findings revealed a need for continual harm reduction supports; that the absence of adequate support teams and management led to poor psychosocial accompaniment, lending itself to a state of constant crisis management; that homeless resources were traumatogenic spaces (that is, can cause trauma) for both service users and service providers; and finally, that larger system-level changes need to be addressed to improve the conditions of people experiencing homelessness who use drugs and alcohol. Cumulatively these findings underline the dire and traumatogenic conditions of homeless services in the locus of a housing affordability crisis, opioid crisis, failing public health system, and under an environment of increased stigma towards people who use drugs and alcohol.