Health of SRO hotel tenants in Downtown Eastside

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 55, No. 8, October 2013, Pages 366-367 News

A UBC study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry reveals the multiple health concerns faced by an esti-mated 3000 tenants in single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The results of the study aim to improve the provision of health care and housing among residents of the Downtown Eastside.

SROs are often the only alternative to homelessness for low-income individuals in Vancouver. Some of these buildings are substandard and many tenants suffer from substance dependence, mental illness, and infectious diseases. The study data show that two-thirds of SRO tenants surveyed were previously homeless, and suffered from an average of three concurrent illnesses. Of those surveyed, 95% had substance dependence and almost two-thirds were involved in injection drug use. Nearly half suffered from psychosis, 18% were HIV positive, and 70% had been exposed to hepatitis C. The study found that the death rate for participants was nearly 5 times greater than in the general population. 

The research team, which included investigators from seven departments at UBC and Simon Fraser Universi-ty, conducted psychiatric as--sessments, neurological evaluations, MRIs, and blood tests with 293 SRO hotel tenants who participated in the study over an average of 2 years.

The study, entitled “The Hotel Study: Multimorbidity in a Community Sample Living in Marginal Housing” can be viewed at http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org.

. Health of SRO hotel tenants in Downtown Eastside. BCMJ, Vol. 55, No. 8, October, 2013, Page(s) 366-367 - News.



Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply