Research on psychiatric care of homeless drug users
Hello all,
I am a German medical student and work part time in a homeless shelter for active drug users. It's located right next to a massive gathering "hotspot" for homeless people.
The city has recently invested in expanding psychiatric care for this group, including (1) a new psychiatric outpatient clinic right next to my shelter, and (2) an outreach psychiatry program run by the university hospital, still in the planning phase.
Overall, the psychiatric department in my city's university is weak on research, and particularly in this niche there has been almost no research in my city in the past decade.
However, since I've been working in this environment with these patients for a while now I'd love to do research on these new care programs and psychiatric care of this patient collective in general. I am currently trying to find someone to mentor me, but it would be easier if I already had a specific direction or research question in mind.
I am not particularly excited about just doing a meta analysis on studies related to this topic. Ideally, I'd like to collect my own data, for example doing questionnaires on homeless people (who I already work and interact with regularly at my side job) or my social worker colleagues. I feel like I am in a uniquely suiting position to collect data from this population.
I could simply do a questionnaire to investigate the homeless people's attitudes towards the new outpatient clinic, for example. But I feel like this might be kind of... useless, and wouldn't help in improving psychiatric care for this population.
What could be interesting and worthwhile questions or aspects to investigate here?