Conférencière: Gracia Dong (University of Toronto)

Most attempts to enumerate the homeless population rely on point-in-time or shelter counts, which can be costly and inaccurate. As an alternative, we use electronic health data from the Vancouver Island Health Authority, British Columbia, Canada from 2013 to 2022 to identify adults contending with homelessness based on their self-reported housing status. We estimate the annual population size of this population using a flexible open-population capture-recapture model that considers 1) the age and gender structure of the population, including aging across detection occasions, 2) annual recruitment into the population, 3) behavioural-response, and 4) apparent survival in the population, including emigration and incorporating known deaths. We then compare our estimates of annual population size with reported point-in-time counts of homeless populations on Vancouver Island over the same period and find that using data extracts from electronic health records gives comparable estimates when data quality is good. We then discuss data requirements, data quality issues with administrative health data, and potential ways to remedy estimates when data is insufficient, while keeping into consideration constraints imposed by computational data privacy restrictions.

Séminaire en ligne sur Zoom : https://uqam.zoom.us/j/85453387054