Funding Slashed For Homeless Outreach

NHS bosses are being criticised for cutting the budget of a team of doctors and nurses who provide mental health care to one of Britain’s largest groups of homeless people.

According to a report in The Guardian, Camden NHS Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) in north London is giving the Focus Homeless Outreach team £219,866 less a year starting on 1 April, a leaked CCG document reveals. One of the team’s two psychiatrists and one of its six nurses will lose their jobs as a result.

The CCG is pressing ahead with the 42% cut to the £521,000 budget it gave the team this year despite a storm of protest from local GPs, psychiatrists, homeless charities and managers of hostels where rough sleepers sometimes stay. Camden had the third highest rate of rough sleeping in England in 2017, recent government statistics showed – more than Manchester, Bristol and Cornwall.

Focus, set up 25 years ago, helps treat the high levels of depression, psychosis and other mental health conditions found in rough sleepers, hostel dwellers and “sofa surfers”, including some asylum seekers and people who have been trafficked. Its budget is being reduced even though it is regarded as a model of good practice of how to reach the kind of group that often shuns traditional NHS services.

Family doctors at Camden Health Improvement Practice, a GP surgery near Euston station which treats homeless people’s physical health needs, have told the CCG in a letter that they are in a state of disbelief about Focus’s budget cut. It gives essential mental health support to homeless people when they are arrested or admitted to hospital as an emergency, they said.

Prof Roland Littlewood, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at University College London who used to work with Focus, said: “The proposed cuts cannot be clinically justified and I would consider them quite dangerous. When we in the future contemplate the increased number of preventable deaths in the service, it will be too late. If May and Hunt are promising increased support for mental health services, then where is it? The homeless are the most vulnerable to declining social and medical support.”

Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents NHS trusts, praised national health service leaders for giving mental health greater priority. But, she added, Camden CCG’s decision “confirms once again what mental health trust leaders have been telling us about the growing gap between the government’s welcome ambition for the care of people with mental health needs and the substantial challenges facing core mental health services.”

She commented: “Money earmarked for mental health is not consistently reaching the frontline. It is particularly important that vulnerable people such as the homeless are able to access mental health services.”

A spokesperson for Camden CCG said: “Due to significant financial challenges, the NHS is having to make difficult decisions and it has been necessary to reduce funding of the Focus homeless service. Camden CCG has worked with Camden & Islington NHS Foundation Trust to reconfigure the service so that it dedicates its efforts to helping those with the most complex needs. Those with less complex needs will be signposted to other suitable health and care services in Camden.”