Organizations aiming to help homeless people with either housing or health care can be more effective when they form partnerships with other service groups, a Rutgers study has found. “Our paper describes how homeless services and health care providers are working together to tackle the challenge of providing healthcare to the unhoused,” said Joel Cantor, director of the Rutgers Center for State Health Policy, a Distinguished Professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and coauthor of the paper published in The Milbank Quarterly.
“With the right organizational and financial arrangements, organizations are demonstrating that it is possible to make effective use of limited resources,” Cantor said. The findings come at a time of anxiety for health and housing providers. Advocates warn that possible delays in federal aid for people experiencing homelessness, along with changes to harm reduction strategies, could have severe health consequences for the roughly 770,000 people nationwide – including about 14,000 in New Jersey – who are unhoused. To read the full story.