Analyse homelessness as a priority issue using the determinants of health and apply the Ottawa Charter to build community resilience for people at risk of or experiencing homelessness

What this dot point is asking

Homelessness is one of the three Unit 3 elective topics, alongside transport safety and anxiety. If your school selects it, QCAA expects you to analyse homelessness as a community health priority using the determinants of health and to apply the Ottawa Charter to build resilience. This is not a social-studies essay on homelessness; it is a health inquiry that applies the course frameworks. Strong responses connect determinants to measurable health outcomes and design integrated action rather than describing the problem.

The answer

Homelessness as a health issue

Homelessness ranges from sleeping rough to couch-surfing and living in severely crowded or insecure housing. It matters in Health because it is both caused by and a cause of poor health. People experiencing homelessness have far higher rates of chronic illness, mental ill-health, injury and premature death than the housed population, and face major barriers to accessing care. In salutogenic terms, homelessness strips away generalised resistance resources and pushes people towards the dis-ease end of the continuum.

The determinants that drive homelessness

Analyse homelessness through the determinant categories rather than treating it as a personal failing:

• Economic determinants: housing affordability, unemployment, low income and rental market pressure push people out of secure housing.
• Social determinants: family breakdown, domestic and family violence, and weak social support networks are leading immediate causes.
• Environmental determinants: a shortage of affordable and crisis housing, and the location of services away from where people in need live.
• Cultural determinants: discrimination and the over-representation of some groups, including First Nations Australians, reflecting structural disadvantage.

The high-mark move is showing these determinants interact. Domestic violence (social) combined with unaffordable housing (economic) and no crisis beds (environmental) produces homelessness that no single factor explains.

Applying the Ottawa Charter

Build resilience by integrating action across the action areas:

• Build healthy public policy: social and affordable housing investment, tenancy protections and income support.
• Create supportive environments: safe crisis accommodation and welcoming community spaces located where people need them.
• Strengthen community action: peer support networks and community organisations that mobilise local resources and reduce isolation.
• Develop personal skills: financial literacy, tenancy skills and help-seeking, building generalised resistance resources.
• Reorient health services: outreach and assertive services that reach people who cannot easily attend a clinic, with no-barrier access.

A response that shows policy, environment and reoriented services reinforcing each other, rather than relying on a single awareness campaign, demonstrates the integrated thinking the criteria reward.

Evidencing homelessness with data

QCAA criteria reward analysis built on credible evidence. For homelessness, draw on the Australian Bureau of Statistics Census of Population and Housing estimates of homelessness, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Specialist Homelessness Services data, and Queensland Government housing reports. These establish that homelessness is a genuine and measurable priority, reveal which groups are over-represented (including young people, those fleeing family violence, and First Nations Australians), and let you judge whether a proposed action narrows or widens the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged groups. Linking a determinant to a measurable health outcome, for example connecting insecure housing to higher rates of untreated chronic illness and mental ill-health, is what lifts an answer from descriptive to analytical.

A salutogenic, strengths-based framing

The salutogenic model asks what keeps a community well, not only what causes harm. For people at risk of homelessness, generalised resistance resources, such as secure income, tenancy skills, supportive relationships and accessible services, help them stay nearer the ease end of the ease-dis-ease continuum. A community with a high collective sense of coherence, where the situation is comprehensible, coping feels manageable and engagement feels meaningful, can mobilise to support members under housing stress. Framing action as building these resources, rather than only responding after a crisis, aligns with the Unit 3 lens and earns higher criteria bands.