SERVICES PROVIDED BY A HOMELESS INTERVENTION - POLICY AND PLANNING IMPLICATIONS

Despite the acknowledged need for effective programs to serve persons who are homeless and mentally ill, fete evaluations of these programs provide quantitative details on service provision. Such information ca n be useful to planners for replication and also for public policy con cerning the need to mandate services most in demand. This report on a successful outreach intervention reports information on service amount s, duration, and types, as well as identifying predictors of service u se. The overall amount of service provided to eligible participants va ried substantially. While the median duration was only three months, r epeat service episodes were common. For most clients, homeless project intervention included a variety of types of activities; most prevalen t were housing, case management, mental health interventions and servi ce entry, including engagement and assessment. Skill-building activiti es were relatively infrequent. Results from a cluster analysis, used t o group clients based on patterns of services received, showed that gr oupings followed a focus on either: mental health, case management, ho using, or a low overall level of fetal services. Surprisingly, no indi vidual client descriptors or demographics related to cluster membershi p; only project site and recruitment source were significant predictor s. The discussion suggests implications of these findings for other pr ojects and sites and brings into question whether or not service parti cipation and receipt by individuals who are homeless and mentally ill reflect characteristics of clients or of systems available to serve th em.