Central Intake calls

If you are in need of emergency shelter space, please call the City of Toronto’s Central Intake line at 416-338-4766 or 1-877-338-3398.

This catalogue entry provides two data sets related to calls to Central Intake.

Central Intake is a City-operated, 24/7 telephone-based service that offers referrals to emergency shelter and other overnight accommodation, as well as information about other homelessness services. These two data sets provide information about calls received by Central Intake, the outcomes of those calls, and the number of individuals who could not be matched to a shelter space each day.

The first, Central Intake Service Queue Data, provides counts of the number of unique individuals who contacted Central Intake to access emergency shelter but were not matched to a shelter space. Generated through Central Intake caseworkers' use of the City's Shelter Management Information System (SMIS), the data are reported as a count for every operational day.

The SMIS service queue for Central Intake records when a bed is requested for a caller seeking a shelter space. Those callers who could not be matched to an available space that suits their needs at the time of their call remain in the queue until they can be provided a referral or until the closeout process at the end of the night (i.e. 4:00 a.m.).

Service Queue data combines data exported from the Central Intake service queue at 4:00 a.m., with manually coded outcome data based on the review of each individual's SMIS records for the day. SSHA began collecting data on how many people remain unmatched in the service queue over a 24 hour period at the beginning of November 2020. Given the manual nature of the preparation of the data in this data set, this file will be updated on a monthly basis. Data will be reported separately for every operational day in that month.

The second data set, Central Intake Call Wrap-Up Codes Data, provides counts of calls answered by Central Intake, classified by the nature of the call. When a call is handled by a caseworker at Central Intake, the caseworker assigns a wrap-up code to the call. This tracking allows for analysis of call trends.

Central Intake uses 13 distinct wrap-up codes to code the calls they receive. This data set provides a daily summary of the number of calls received by each call wrap-up code. The data are manually retrieved from the City's call centre database reports. Given the manual nature of the preparation of the data in this data set, this file will be updated on a monthly basis. Data will be reported separately for every operational day in that month.

Please note that while the wrap-up codes provide information related to the volume and type of calls answered by Central Intake, the data do not track requests made by unique individuals nor the ultimate outcomes of referrals.

Please also note that the previews and Data Features below only show information pertaining to the Central Intake Call Wrap-Up Codes Data dataset.