By the end of 2024, it was estimated that there were at least 354,000 people homeless in England.
Being homeless can have a devastating effect on people’s mental and physical health - and at the same time it can make it more difficult to access health care, including palliative support.
While most people living in the UK in the 2020s can expect to enjoy life well into their 80s, a homeless man or woman could be as young as just 46 when their life ends.
That’s why we have now launched a new training programme aimed at identifying areas of good practice and working towards collaboration with other professionals involved with the homeless population in Sheffield.
The four sessions explore the needs of individuals who are classed as homeless and who have life limiting conditions, looking at how the current provision of palliative care in the community may be adapted to meet those needs.
“Our aim is to make recommendations as to how best practice guidelines could be incorporated into daily practice to improve outcomes for this vulnerable group of individuals,” said our Consultant Nurse Helen Smith.
“These people are dying years too early and that is why we have been doing a lot of work to see what we can do to offer support.”
The sessions look at homelessness specifically in relation to health issues, developing an understanding of complex needs and person-centred care.
The course also explores the ways that neurodiversity and levels of autism can have an impact on homelessness and aims to promote a greater understanding of areas such as symptom management for clients who may have a history of substance or alcohol abuse.
“There is also a need to understand how alcohol consumption can affect the patient as well as learning about difficulties around unsocial behaviour, poor housing, no heating and the fact that, for many of these people, a bed might just be a mattress on a floor,” said Helen.
“By the end of the four weeks we aim to show that, even with all the problems that come with homelessness, it is still possible to offer palliative and end of life care for people with nowhere to live.
“Working with homeless people when they are at their most vulnerable can be challenging at times - you have to accept that this is how this person is living and this is where they are and you need to be able to develop an understanding of how you can support them wherever they are, even though that support might be difficult to administer.
“Building trust is a big thing and then all you can hope is that you will do your best for them, just as we would for any other patient.
“There is a real call for this sort of service but the real difficulty is that we don’t know how many people we are missing and how many people have died without the support we could have offered.”