Guidance
This guideline covers providing integrated health and social care services for people experiencing homelessness. It aims to improve access to and engagement with health and social care, and ensure care is coordinated across different services.
Recommendations
This guideline includes recommendations on:
- general principles and planning and commissioning
- multidisciplinary service provision, including homelessness multidisciplinary teams, homelessness leads and intermediate care
- improving access to and engagement with services, including outreach, the role of peers and long-term support
- assessing individual needs
- transitions between different settings and providing housing with health and social care support
- safeguarding
- staff support and development
Who is it for?
- Local authorities
- Commissioners and providers of services
- Healthcare practitioners in primary, secondary and tertiary care
- Social care practitioners
- People who experience homelessness, their families, advocates, and the public
Guideline development process
How we develop NICE guidelines
This guideline was developed by the National Guideline Alliance, which is hosted by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG). The guideline was developed with complete independence from RCOG governance.
NICE worked with the Centre for Homelessness Impact on this guideline.
Your responsibility
The recommendations in this guideline represent the view of NICE, arrived at after careful consideration of the evidence available. When exercising their judgement, professionals and practitioners are expected to take this guideline fully into account, alongside the individual needs, preferences and values of their patients or the people using their service. It is not mandatory to apply the recommendations, and the guideline does not override the responsibility to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual, in consultation with them and their families and carers or guardian.
All problems (adverse events) related to a medicine or medical device used for treatment or in a procedure should be reported to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency using the Yellow Card Scheme.
Local commissioners and providers of healthcare have a responsibility to enable the guideline to be applied when individual professionals and people using services wish to use it. They should do so in the context of local and national priorities for funding and developing services, and in light of their duties to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, to advance equality of opportunity and to reduce health inequalities. Nothing in this guideline should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with complying with those duties.
Commissioners and providers have a responsibility to promote an environmentally sustainable health and care system and should assess and reduce the environmental impact of implementing NICE recommendations wherever possible.