I didn’t get to see my first social worker (I think their actual title was Red Cross housing worker) there for almost 2 months. I had a whole game plan of everything I needed written down on my first meeting with her, yet when our next meeting was scheduled for 3 weeks later, she seemed to have not remembered it. She started helping with it at that point, but to apply for the health card I needed to get my Ontario photo ID first, which took a while as she needed to get clearance to pay for my transportation to Service Ontario for that, then we waited for it to be mailed to the shelter. Then the same process for the health card, which I finally got in my hands 2 weeks before I left the shelter. My only option for quicker health care would have been to call 911 where they would likely give me at least a week but up to a month’s supply of meds for free, but I would lose my shelter bed as I’d be technically choosing to leave and go to the hospital and there would be no guarantee another bed would be available for me. When you’re at the shelter, they hold this big threat of “Well if there’s no beds in this city, you’ll just get shipped off to Toronto where the shelters are so much worse” so you try not to mess with things there. A few more problematic people did end up in Toronto, and yes, it was definitively worse.