Recently it's come to my attention that BC Housing has disabled the Geographic Region field on the Client Vitals screen.

The news that one community has disabled that particular field is not a surprise to me, nor should it shock you. I generally recommend to every community that asks that they should probably disable this field. I wrote a blog post about it back in 2018. https://www.acreconsulting.ca/blog/75778-geo-region-vitals The reason why it's not useful is because it's so vague about how it should be used optimally - should it contain where the client is from, currently is, or is intending to move to?

However, the only situation where I can think of that the Geographic Region field is actually useful is if you have a very large catchment area, like a province-wide database. Like in BC. One would presume that you'd then use the Geographic Region filter to filter clients and only show the ones in your local area. You could use this filter for BNLs for example, in the Coordinated Access module. Which is what the Coordinated Access module does, and I'm told that planned modifications to any reports that respect Geographic Regions would also use the same behaviour.

In other words, this field is not useful for 90% of instances, and of the 10% where it is useful, at least some are not using it because they too don't feel that it's useful.

I propose that one of two things happens: either get rid of the Geographic Region field on the Client Vitals screen, or automatically update it. The latter could be a relatively easy fix: any time a client stays in a shelter, or has a housing history record (or potentially receives a service), the Geographic Region field on the vitals screen should automatically be populated with the Geographic Region on the housing history/stay/service provider. There's some nuance to this - I'd probably create an application setting that would turn this behaviour on or off, somewhat like the default file numbers setting. You'd also need to define what happens if the geographic region field for the most recent record is blank, but that's relatively easy to sort out.