Dr. Fiona O'Reilly:

There is a old story about coming upon a river and seeing a load of people drowning. One puts the emergency project in place and starts to pull people out of the river. That is what we are doing. We and our colleagues are working very innovatively to get drowning people out of the river. The problem is that more and more people are falling into the river and a social housing bridge or some such thing needs to be built. We cannot really do that because we are too busy dragging people out of the river. Perhaps people from mainstream public agencies including social protection, primary care or local authorities should be invited before the committee to be asked what they are doing for health and homelessness. How are they preventing people from falling into the river? Are they adapting flexibly to people in their community who are at risk of homelessness? How are they preventing it? We all have good ideas but we are just pulling people out of the river.

I saw an excellent movie recently, "I, Daniel Blake", which should be mandatory for anybody in public services or medicine because it shows how the State helps people into homelessness.