Housing Conditions: Evaluation, Advocacy and Research in Toronto Community Housing (HEARTH)

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.

Study Overview

• Status: Completed
• Conditions: Housing
• Intervention / Treatment: Behavioral: Community Organizing

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 Type: Interventional
• Enrollment (Actual): 53
• Phase: Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

Study Locations

• Canada
  • Ontario
    • Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5B1W8
      • St. Michael's Hospital

Participation Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

• Ages Eligible for Study: 18 years and older (Adult, Older Adult)
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: Yes

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

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

Exclusion Criteria:

• under 18 years old

Study Plan

How is the study designed?

Design Details

• Primary Purpose: Other
• Allocation: N/A
• Interventional Model: Single Group Assignment
• Masking: None (Open Label)

Number of Arms

1

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm

Intervention / Treatment

Experimental: 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.

Behavioral: Community Organizing; The intervention will be community organizing and will consist of engaging tenants, health providers, legal service staff, social service agencies and advocacy organizations (e.g. ACORN). Each building team will identify initial priorities and then invite all building members to discuss and to finalize, as well as a plan for change. Building teams will engage in advocacy to TCHC and its representatives, and other city departments as appropriate. Engaging in advocacy will consist of a wide range of activities but essentially means presenting evidence (e.g. personal experiences, data) to policymakers and decision makers to affect change.

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Tenant engagement in intervention	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.	12 months
Building conditions	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.	12 months
Health (Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) scale)	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.	12 months

Collaborators and Investigators

• Sponsor: Unity Health Toronto
• Investigators: Principal Investigator: Andrew Pinto, MSc MD, Unity Health Toronto

Study record dates

Study Major Dates

• Study Start (Actual): October 22, 2018
• Primary Completion (Actual): July 2, 2020
• Study Completion (Actual): March 3, 2021

Study Registration Dates

• First Submitted: May 31, 2019
• First Submitted That Met QC Criteria: October 17, 2019
• First Posted (Actual): October 18, 2019

Study Record Updates

• Last Update Posted (Actual): March 25, 2025
• Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria: January 3, 2025
• Last Verified: December 1, 2024

More Information

Terms related to this study

• Keywords: Community organizing; Advocacy
• Other Study ID Numbers: SMH-18-154

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

• Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?: UNDECIDED

Drug and device information, study documents

• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product: No
• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product: No
• product manufactured in and exported from the U.S.: No