ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the health problems of homeless children, youth, and women seen in the National Health Care for the Homeless Program (HCH) during the program’s first year. On virtually all measures, homeless people—whether children or adults, whether men or women – are more ill than their counterparts in the domiciled ambulatory patient population; homelessness is indeed “unhealthy for children and other living things.” Among children and youth, chronic physical disorders occur at approximately twice the rate of occurrence among ambulatory children in general. Pregnancies are noted as a special health problem; among HCH women, more than a tenth have been pregnant at or since first contact with HCH, a pregnancy rate approximately twice that for US women in general.
