Housing Conditions: Evaluation, Advocacy and Research in Toronto Community Housing

Not Applicable

Completed

• Conditions: Housing
• Interventions: Behavioral: Community Organizing

• Registration Number: NCT04131101
• Lead Sponsor: Unity Health Toronto

Brief Summary

This project will examine whether a health promotion campaign using community organizing and joint advocacy by a coalition of tenants, health providers, social service agencies and advocates can lead to improvements in building conditions and health in social housing.

Detailed Description

This community based participatory research project will bring together patients of the St. Michael's Hospital Academic Family Health Team (FHT) who are tenants of Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) with health providers, legal service staff at the Health Justice Program, social service agencies and advocacy organizations to advocate to improve building conditions in three TCHC buildings. The researchers will evaluate the acceptability and feasibility of this health promotion campaign as well as changes in the state of housing and self rated physical and mental health of tenants.

Study Timeline

• Study Start: 2018-10-22
• Study First Submitted: 2019-05-31
• Study First Submitted QC: 2019-10-17
• Study First Posted: 2019-10-18
• Primary Completion: 2020-07-02
• Study Completion: 2021-03-03
• Status Verified: 2024-12
• Last Update Submitted: 2025-01-03
• Last Update Posted: 2025-01-06

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: COMPLETED
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 53

Inclusion Criteria

• 18 years or older
• Living in one of the three TCHC buildings

Exclusion Criteria

• under 18 years old

Study & Design

• Study Type: INTERVENTIONAL
• Study Design: SINGLE_GROUP

Arm && Interventions

Group	Intervention	Description
Community Organizing	Community Organizing	All tenants in three TCHC buildings will be invited to participate in a survey on their building conditions at baseline, 6 months and 12 months. Once baseline data collection is complete, there will be a community organizing campaign involving tenants to advocate for improved building conditions.

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Tenant engagement in intervention	12 months	Acceptability and feasibility of the intervention, assessed through qualitative focus groups with participants in each intervention building. The HEARTH Survey was built by the research team (example question: How satisfied are you with the condition of your building?). All qualitative data will be managed and analyzed with the data management software, NVivo.
Building conditions	12 months	Change in the state of housing evaluated by a questionnaire completed by tenants and official reports from the Toronto Community Housing Corporation. The HEARTH survey consisted of various questions relating to this, leading to different answers due to different scales. For example, for safety of the building, the options were: very safe, fairly safe, neither safe nor unsafe, fairly unsafe, and very unsafe. All scales had 5 options/outcomes but different wordings. No quantitative score was used for this.
Health (Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) scale)	12 months	Change in self-rated physical and mental health, sense of security, social integration, evaluated by surveys of residents using PROMIS scale. This scale is validated. For pain, the minimum score is 0 and the maximum score is 10, with 10 representing the worst pain imaginable. The higher the number on the scale, the worse the outcome/issue is.

Trial Locations

Locations (1)

St. Michael's Hospital; 🇨🇦 Toronto, Ontario, Canada