Category: Funding

Can Pathway ‘Bag’ Your Vote?

Posted on by E Morrison

Pathway calls on Brighton shoppers to help homeless patients

A nurse and doctor talking to a homeless patient sitting on a hospital bed

Pathway, a small charity helping seriously ill homeless people, has been shortlisted for a supermarket charity scheme across Brighton and Hove. Tesco ‘Bags of Help’ gives money raised from carrier bag sales to community projects. Pathway is one of three groups that has been shortlisted for a grant of up to £4000.  

 The Pathway team at Brighton and Sussex University Hospital helps homeless patients to:  

 Find accommodation, 

  • Sort out financial problems,  
  • Register with a GP, 
  • Reconnect with lost family and loved ones.  

 Without help from Pathway teams, many hospitals would be forced to discharge homeless patients to sleep rough after treatment, running the risk of their illness returning.  Brighton and Sussex University Hospital is one of only 11 hospitals across England to offer this specialist support.

During May and June Tesco shoppers in Brighton will be able to vote for Pathway and other shortlisted charities using a token given to them at the checkout each time they shop. Alex Bax, Chief Executive of Pathway said: 

“Your token in the box can make a real difference to homeless people. A little bit of help from a Pathway team can help people get life back on track.” 

 Bags of Help has already given over £36 million to nearly 8000 projects across the UK. Alec Brown, Head of Community at Tesco, said: 

  “We are absolutely delighted to open the voting for May and June. There are some fantastic projects on the shortlists and we can’t wait to see these come to life in hundreds of communities.” 

Money raised by the scheme will go towards ‘Dignity in Care’ packages, making sure patients have toiletries and pyjamas during their stay, clean warm clothes when they are discharged, and bedding and crockery if they are moving into a home for the first time.  

 Ends 

 Notes to Editors 

  1. The Bags of Help initiative is supported by money raised from carrier bag sales in Tesco stores.  
  2. The scheme is administered by Groundwork. 
  3. Bags of Help funding is available to community groups and charities looking to fund local projects that bring benefits to communities. Anyone can nominate a project and organisations can apply online. For more information please visit: www.tesco.com/bagsofhelp 
  4. Customers can vote for Pathway at the following Tesco stores:  

6012    Brighton – Queen’s Road Tesco Express (BN1 3XF)
5321    Brighton – Jubilee Street Tesco Express (BN1 1GE)
3461    Brighton – Western Road Tesco Express (BN3 1JB)
2724    Hove – Droveway Tesco Express (BN3 6LE)
2700    Hove – Tesco Superstore (BN3 2DL)
2704    Hove – Denmark Villas Tesco Express (BN3 3TJ)
2696    Hove – Tesco Express (BN3 6NF)
6576    Hove – Westway Tesco Express (BN3 8LD)
3052    Portslade – Tesco Metro (BN41 1GB)
3447    Woodingdean – Tesco Express (BN2 6BB) 

About Pathway 

Pathway works to improve healthcare for people who are homeless. We’ve helped the NHS create 11 teams of doctors, nurses and social care professionals work across England, supporting 3500 patients every year. Pathway also develops models to facilitate improvements in patient care, carries out research in new and developing areas, provides training for healthcare professionals and supports specialist commissioning. The charity hosts The Faculty for Homeless and Inclusion Health, a network of over 1000 professionals involved in healthcare for people on the edges of society. 

 

Pathway wins award to replicate homeless hospital team intervention

Posted on by E Morrison

Pathway has been selected by the Health Foundation, an independent charity, to be part of an innovative programme to improve health and social care by using novel scaling approaches to widen use of successful health and social care interventions.

The Exploring Social Franchising and Licensing programme supports four organisations to replicate interventions that they have already tested and proven to work. The organisations will employ replication techniques, social franchising and licensing, that have not yet been used widely in the UK.

The initiative from Pathway improves healthcare for homeless hospital patients, by creating NHS teams to:

  • Support and advocate for patients who are homeless in hospital,
  • Help homeless patients to find accommodation and release NHS beds,
  • Support people dealing with financial issues
  • Access help to address personal problems that contribute to their homelessness
  • Help people reconnect with lost loved ones.

The approach has been proven to improve health and housing outcomes for patients and is currently used in 11 hospitals across England. Chief Executive Officer Alex Bax said:

“We are delighted to have won the chance to participate in this programme. It’s a fantastic opportunity for us to explore, with the experts, whether we can spread our ‘Pathway hospital team’ model more rapidly, to benefit some of the most vulnerable and excluded patients the NHS supports.”

The new programme will run for one year and each project will receive up to £145,000 to develop approaches that will enable the project to spread their successful health and care intervention to other sites across the UK in future. Sarah Henderson, Assistant Director at the Health Foundation said:

“We are very excited to support four outstanding project teams and organisations, selected because of their ambition, experience of spreading successful health and care interventions, and importantly, because we think their interventions have considerable potential to be replicated using social franchising or licensing techniques.

“Working together, as part of the Exploring Social Franchising and Licensing programme, we hope to increase understanding of whether social franchising and licensing can be used to support a more sustainable and systematic approach to replicating proven health and social care interventions and the conditions under which these methods are most useful. We hope that we can enable successful inventions to be used more widely to improve care for patients and service users.”

Ends

Notes to editors

The media contact for this story is Sushma Sangyam:
sushma.sangyam@health.org.uk
020 7257 2092

About the Health Foundation

The Health Foundation is an independent charity committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK.
www.health.org.uk

About Pathway

Pathway works to improve healthcare for people who are homeless. We’ve helped the NHS create 11 teams of doctors, nurses and social care professionals work across England, supporting 3500 patients every year. Pathway also develops models to facilitate improvements in patient care, carries out research in new and developing areas, provides training for healthcare professionals and supports specialist commissioning.

The charity hosts The Faculty for Homeless and Inclusion Health, a network of over 1000 professionals and people with lived experience of exclusion, including vulnerable migrants, people who are homeless, from gypsy and traveller communities, or who sell sex.
www.pathway.org.uk