Improving dental access of young adults who experience homelessness
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Understanding programmes that improve conditions of access to primary care dental services for young adults with experience of homelessness: findings of a realist evaluation in England
IRAS ID
280835
Contact name
Maryam Ahmadyar
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Oxford / Clinical Trials and Research Governance
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 8 months, 29 days
Research summary
Research Summary
Homelessness is a problem that affects many people in the UK. This is expected to become worst in the next 10 years. We know that homeless people suffer from much higher and more severe dental problems compared to the general public. We also know that this affects them in more negative ways (mental health, eating etc.) compared to people who are not homeless.Populations suffering from homelessness can be divided into different categories. One such category is young adults aged 18-25 years. At the moment, we don’t have much information about dental care of young adults with experience of homelessness (YAEH). So we don’t know what works for them and what doesn’t. We also don’t know how dental services should be delivered to meet their needs, and if there should be anything to bear in mind for young adults who come from different backgrounds? We also don’t know the situations that make dental services work better or worst for this group?
The reason for doing this research is to find answers for the above questions. In short, we want to understand the ways to improve conditions of dental access for young adults with experience of homelessness. We have already learnt from the available research literature in this topic. We have used this learning to form some explanations of what we think should be done. Now we want to gather more information to test our explanations to see how much of it is right, wrong or needs changing. We also want to see if we should add any new explanations that we might have missed from our readings.
We plan to do this by collecting information from 3 groups of people:
•Young adults with experience of homelessness (18-25 years)
•Any member of the dental team that provides services for homeless people
•YAEH knowledge experts (anyone with good working knowledge or experience of YAEH, such as support workers, charity staff or other professionals)We will use this information to change our explanations as much as needed. We will then present these explanations for different groups of people and professionals to use. We hope that this will result in improved knowledge, which may help YAEH being able to access dental services more easily.
Summary of Results
I was able to use my findings to develop theoretical explanations about how services can improve dental access of young adults who experience homelessness. I am still at the final stages of my data analysis, though my findings are promising and have made important contributions to this field.REC name
West of Scotland REC 4
REC reference
21/WS/0004
Date of REC Opinion
29 Jan 2021
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion