Housing crisis having ‘huge impact’ on health of people on low incomes, expert warns

Dental and physical health suffer a 'huge impact' when people do not have a home or secure housing, Dr Cliona Ni Cheallaigh warned. File picture: iStock

The Government must build more houses if it wants to tackle poor health outcomes for people on low incomes, an expert in inclusion health has said.

Dental and physical health suffer a “huge impact” when people do not have a home or secure housing, Dr Cliona Ni Cheallaigh warned.

She is clinical lead for the Inclusion Health Service at St James's Hospital and a consultant in general medicine and infectious diseases.

“You don’t wait until people are well to put them into housing, you do the housing first,” she said.

“There is some evidence that works better but it requires a lot of additional resources for some people to maintain tenancies. It’s really important.”

She urged: “If I had one ask for the Irish government it would be to just build loads more houses.

"It’s mathematics now, it’s musical chairs.

"You have ten people, you have five chairs so five people are going to end up without a chair.”

Dr Ni Cheallaigh was a keynote speaker at the International Association for Disability and Oral Health conference in Dublin on Thursday.

“Housing, that physical thing of having a safe space is hugely important and it’s very challenging if that is not there,” she said.

Homelessness can also affect whether doctors or dentists can follow up with patients, she said.

A health worker might complain about a patient failing to attend an appointment after sending a reminder card to the address on the system.

“But their address is no-fixed-abode,” Dr Ni Cheallaigh said.

“So I think somewhere in the post office is a large sack of appointment letters for people whose address is no-fixed-abode.” 

She warned: “Social exclusion has a really huge impact on people’s health, hugely inequitable and hugely unfair, hugely preventable."

She also discussed how dentists and doctors should consider the impact of childhood trauma on adults excluded from society.

She described how a 59-year-old man had threatened her at the hospital.

“He was telling me he was going to shoot me if he didn’t get home to play cards with his friends,” she said.

“That’s his way of expressing how he feels. So it’s really important if you’re working with this population to understand that anger and aggression are often coming from a place of fear.” 

The conference is organised by the Irish Society for Disability and Oral Health in partnership with Trinity College Dublin and others.