Health
People who experience homelessness face enormous barriers and obstacles in accessing healthcare, including extreme marginalisation, high stigma and discrimination.
The consequences are severe: those experiencing homelessness have a significantly lower life expectancy than the general population, while people continue to die while living on the street lacking minimum end of life care.
FEANTSA works to investigate, raise awareness on and advocate for eliminating the extreme health inequalities faced by people experiencing homelessness. Our members across Europe work to facilitate access to mainstream health services and to better inform the health systems about the complexity of homelessness. At the level of the EU, FEANTSA follows European public health policies, ensuring that they consider people experiencing homelessness (as well as generally, people living with vulnerabilities) in new initiatives.
Unsurprisingly, being homeless has a significant impact on your health. People who are homeless face enormous barriers and obstacles to accessing healthcare which results in an average age of death of 43 for women and 47 for men. The major factors impacting on the health of a homeless people are i) poor physical health, ii) poor mental health and iii) substance misuse. These tri-morbidity factors arise from the poor quality of life from living on the street or in shelters and the mental strain and anxiety resulting from rough sleeping.
Simona Barbu
The Health and Homelessness Newsletter
FEANTSA regularly shares health and homelessness-related news and resources (inc reports, articles, toolkits etc), which you can access here.
To receive more information about the work of FEANTSA in this area, or if you would like to contribute or subscribe to the Health and Homelessness Newsletter, please contact Simona Barbu.
