Table 4.

Stakeholder quotes: Availability of and access to services

“For a lot women who have - are fleeing violence and also in terms of sort of the women who are dealing with a brain injury, it's - that might not be the best way to connect with people, is through a virtual connection or even when they're trying to sort of seek out services and realizing that the services - no one is there and it's all over the phone.”

“[The charitable sector has] seen a lot of sponsorships and donations, just the revenue generation in general, decrease. So [they may not be] able to offer the same types of services that these women need going forward and will these charities even exist in 6 months? So will there be - the need is not going to go away, but will the ability to meet that need go away?”

“With some of the systems that are either reduced because of COVID or shut down because of COVID, they're not getting any of their counseling or their support from those systems either. And sometimes that's all they had, because some people prefer to talk to somebody outside rather than tell somebody in the family everything about themselves.”

“A lot of time they're doing screening on the phone and only seeing patients in person where needed, where there's a requirement for something, otherwise they'll do virtual appointments . . . if she's still at home and he is there or the kids are around and can hear, she's probably not going to disclose something that's going on. It's also harder to detect or sense some thing's not right here, so or perhaps something is different. So I think it's - I think COVID has changed that part of it in a negative way.”

“If you go back to the chat on the homeless population and housing, affordable housing, I don't know about every place but I know rentals and real estate's sort of closed, shut down for a while during the first part of COVID. And so people were stuck living where they were, which had a huge impact on some people, because they couldn't go anywhere else, they couldn't leave and find an apartment. ”

“One of the benefits, small little benefits we've seen in [location] anyways with COVID is with the housing market having changed so rapidly during COVID, we've actually been able to rehouse people quicker than we had been before COVID.”

“I'd like to add something, which I think is kind of a positive out of COVID, is in [location] there's a group of people that started mutual aid society, which is based on food security for hundreds of people actually. I think there's about 6000 or 7000 people that are now connected that Facebook page. And they do food deliveries regularly, hampers, but also cooked meals for people that aren't able to access. This is outside of these government charity structures. It's based on real social justice, and I really do think that there's models that are outside our - how we defined community care and just being good neighbors again. We have to kind of change the paradigms of the charity model. And really to focus on - maybe this is an opportunity now to focus more on social justice model of care and community.”