KHP Pathway Homeless Team – pilot project
The Kings Health Partners Board invited Dr. Nigel Hewett from the Pathway charity in partnership with Nurse Practitioner Samantha Dorney-Smith from the Guys and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust Health Inclusion Team to put together a Needs Assessment for a Homeless Ward Round service to cover the Kings Health Partner hospitals in 2012. (The Kings Health Partner Trusts are Guys and St. Thomas’, Kings, and the South London and Maudsley.)The Needs Assessment was submitted in January 2013, and is available on this website.
In September 2013 funding was agreed by Lambeth CCG for a pilot of the Homeless Ward Round model for KHP as suggested by the Needs Assessment. The pilot commenced on 2nd December 2013. The pilot is providing services in St. Thomas’, Guys and Kings College hospitals only. The SLAM component of the model is temporarily on hold.Staff for the pilot have been recruited from the GSTT Trust Staff bank or seconded into post from within KHP. The team started taking patients on 6th January 2014. The pilot is due to run for 3 months until the end of March 2014.
Co-incidentally, and entirely separately from the Needs Assessment, two voluntary sector services (Broadway and the Passage) also received money to set up homeless hospital discharge services at St. Thomas’ at exactly the same time. These services have been funded by a one-off £10 million fund that was offered by the DH in May 2013. The organizations also received notice of their successful bids at the beginning of September 2013. Consequently these projects have been fully integrated into the Homeless Ward Round team.
As a consequence the resultant team is a multi-professional and multi-agency team of fourteen staff, of whom five come from the voluntary sector. The team includes two General Practitioners, two General Nurses, an Occupational Therapist, a Social Worker, a Psychiatric Nurse, five Housing Support Workers and an Interim Project Manager.
Kings Health Partners & the Impact Of Homelessness
KHP Pathway Homeless Team Schematic v.2
KHP Pathway Homeless Team