The London Pathway has won one of eight grants from the Health Foundation to be part of their ‘Closing the Gap’ programme. The grant of just under £400,000 over two years is a huge boost to the development of the London Pathway.
It will help to support the continued development of our services at UCLH and the addition of London Pathway Care Navigators to our homeless health teams. London Pathway Care Navigators are people with personal experience of homelessness who will work alongside our specialist medical staff in hospitals to be-friend, mentor and support homeless patients during their time in hospital and, crucially, in the immediate discharge period. The funding also supports us to share what we have achieved so far with colleagues at the Royal London Hospital and Brighton and Sussex NHS Trusts. The two year programme will lead to the publication of detailed reviews of our work with the support of expert independent evaluators from the Health Foundation. It will make a major contribution to the evidence of what works with homeless patients.
Alex Bax, Chief Executive of the London Pathway said, “Becoming part of the Health Foundation’s Closing the Gap programme is tremendously exciting. The rigorous external evaluations that will come out of Closing the Gap will help us learn in much more detail which are the key components of our our service model and provide vital evidence to others in the NHS about the value of the work we do. Central to our approach is putting homeless patients at the centre of their care, and changing medical relationships around them, and this is the core focus of the Health Foundation’s programme. We are also looking forward to learning from the other projects taking part in the scheme.
Click here for more information about the Closing the Gap programme and the Health Foundation.