The Simplified Access Metric (SAM) is a new approach for characterizing emergency shelter access patterns as a measure of shelter client vulnerability. The goal of SAM is to provide shelter operators with an intuitive way to understand access patterns that can be implemented by non-technical staff using spreadsheet operations. Client data from a large North American shelter will be used to demonstrate that SAM produces similar results to traditional transitional, episodic and chronic client cluster analysis. Since SAM requires less data than cluster analysis, it is also able to generate a real time picture of how shelter access patterns are affected by external factors. Timelines generated from nine years of shelter client data using SAM demonstrate the impact of Housing First programming and the COVID-19 lockdown on how people access shelter. Finally, SAM allows shelter staff to move beyond assigning transitional, episodic and chronic labels and instead use the "soft" output of SAM directly as a measure of vulnerability.

翻译：简化访问度量（SAM）是一种表征紧急庇护所使用模式的新方法，可作为庇护所求助者脆弱性的衡量指标。SAM旨在为庇护所工作人员提供一种直观理解使用模式的方式，即使是非技术人员也能通过电子表格操作加以实施。我们采用北美某大型庇护所的求助者数据证明，SAM能产生与传统过渡型、偶发型和长期型求助者聚类分析相似的结果。由于SAM所需数据少于聚类分析，因此还能实时生成外部因素影响庇护所使用模式的动态图景。利用SAM对九年庇护所求助者数据生成的时间轴，展示了"住房优先"计划和新冠疫情封锁对庇护所使用方式的影响。最后，SAM使庇护所工作人员能够超越传统的过渡型、偶发型和长期型标签划分，直接将SAM的"软性"输出作为脆弱性衡量指标。