Academic

Homelessness: multi-layered problem requires a cross-domain approach

1 February 2023

Matty de Wit, Annelies van Loon, Marcel Buster

Journal of Health Sciences (Dutch) (2/2023)

This special issue of the Journal for Health Sciences (TSG), produced with funding from Valente, Platform 31, the academic workshop G4-USER and the academic workshop Impuls of the Radboud university medical center, wants to take the reader into the current developments surrounding the phenomenon. homelessness in the Netherlands.

In the first article of the theme issue 'The epidemiology of homelessness in the Netherlands', Matty de Wit, Marcel Buster, Lisan Jansen Lorkeers and Annelies van Loon discuss estimates and characteristics of groups of homeless people. Their conclusion is that size estimates of the number of homeless people can only be properly interpreted with knowledge of the assumptions of the estimated target groups and with a good description of the groups.

The article by Judith Wolf, Annabel Scheepers, Sara Al Shamma and Linda van den Dries focuses on the prevention of homelessness, and explores what is needed to achieve the goals of the National Action Plan and create the search movement in the Netherlands to solutions afterwards, when people are homeless, to preventing people from becoming further excluded and homeless.

In their contribution, Catelijne Akkermans, Tamara Madern and Marthe Riemeijer put their finger on the sore spot of problematic debt and poverty as a cause of homelessness, and how they have a negative impact on people's health and participation. They describe what is needed to tackle this problem, especially structurally. In their article, Jeroen van der Velden and Frank Wassenberg mainly address the housing issue, partly by focusing the spotlight on a relatively new group of homeless people, namely the economically homeless.