Homeless Health Programme Priorities

Our activity focuses on improved housing, specialist outreach support and making sure more homeless people can access the healthcare services they need.

To improve the health of people who are or at risk of becoming homeless, we first want to reduce homelessness overall. We also want to make sure people get the support they need to stay well and prevent long-term health conditions from developing.

Our main priorities and what we’re doing to support these are summarised below.

Getting more people into stable accommodation.

  • A specialist team is supporting single people living in temporary accommodation to secure offers of long-term settled accommodation.

Improving temporary housing.

  • Our housing team at Lambeth Council will improve the quality of temporary accommodation through closer contract monitoring and improved technology.

Delivering specialist rough sleeping outreach support.

Our outreach workers are people who work out and about in the community and give individual support to people who are rough sleeping.

  • The Lambeth Rough Sleeping Outreach Team will continue to make sure rough sleepers found in Lambeth are offered a route off the streets
  • Long-term entrenched rough sleepers will continue to be offered help from specialist staff, such as a Living on the Streets worker, public protection officer and approved mental health professionals.

Helping more people in supported housing to access the healthcare services they need.

  • We’re developing better ways to check and support more people to be registered with a GP.
  • We want to help more residents in supported housing get regular support from mental health services.
  • We’re aiming to increase referrals into drug treatment services and improve rates of uptake of these services for people who are rough sleeping or in supported housing.