Roundtable: A survey for the primary care concerns of people who have experienced homelessness: Practical introduction

We will describe the research involved in creating the Primary Care Quality-Homeless (PCQ-H) surveys. We will introduce both versions of the survey: the long and short forms. We will give examples of practical experiences using the survey so that program and clinical staff in other settings can decide both whether this survey represents a good fit for their organization and how best to administer it. The practical experiences will include review of the experience of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless program (which has administered over 1,000 PCQ-H surveys over the past three years); the Homeless Patient-Aligned Care Team at Birmingham VA Medical Center, and a volunteer student clinic in Birmingham, Equal Access Birmingham. We will describe methods of administration based on in-person administration by trained volunteers, use of mailed surveys, and administration by a single student volunteer. We will describe our screening and recruitment processes with patients and how we adapt them to appropriately fit each site we survey. We will explain how we have adapted to clinic flow: becoming fully equipped, survey-administering mobile units. We will describe the collaboration between BHCHP and the UABMC teams to analyze the data collected with the surveys. This will include a discussion on question response trends, the addition of an open-ended question, and stratification by demographic factors. We will also describe the follow-up action steps we have taken as a program based on the results of the survey including new research to study patterns of response across over 5000 veterans who have experienced homelessness in 28 care settings.