The NHS 10 Year Plan is bold, ambitious and describes a vision of how we all want to be treated – with continuous, accessible and integrated care when and where we need it.
The experiences of people facing homelessness and other kinds of social exclusion are the furthest way from this vision, and they suffer the problems described in the Plan most acutely. We therefore welcome the Plan’s recognition of the poor health and early deaths of people facing homelessness as an ‘intolerable injustice’.
There is much in the Plan that could change this, such as more assertive mental health outreach (a key ask of Pathway’s policy papers), care plans for people with complex needs, and multidisciplinary teams working in neighbourhoods. Indeed, many inclusion health specialist services already work in this way.
There are also reasons to be cautious. Such an emphasis on digital access requires specific mitigations for people who face digital exclusion. And a performance regime that does not have the data to measure the NHS’s impact on people facing homelessness risks deepening exclusion.
More work is needed to set out how the Plan will meet the needs of people facing the most extreme health inequalities. We look forward to working with the Government to make this a reality, including through the cross-Government homelessness strategy.
The Government describes this Plan as a break from the past, and a reimagining of how the NHS works. Against a backdrop of rising homelessness and poverty, putting these needs at the heart of this reimagining is an opportunity for genuinely historic reform. We look to the Government to seize it.