Project Overview
Pathway is the UK’s leading homeless healthcare charity, and has helped 11 hospitals in England to create teams who take care of over 3,500 homeless patients every year. Pathway also carries out research and provides training through the Faculty for Homeless and Inclusion Health, a network of more than 1,700 people who are passionate about healthcare for excluded groups.
Previous work of theirs, undertaken in a hostel in London, identified that people experiencing homelessness and social exclusion are at extremely high risk of developing premature frailty and a range of conditions normally associated with people who are much older.
Using ISLA’s grant, they are now working with a group of hostels in London to develop a way of quantifying this level of need, by formulating and testing a reproducible screening tool and short frailty questionnaire for reporting presence of frailty amongst residents. The aim is something that can be administered by hostel staff or filled out by residents themselves.
By recognising and reporting it, hostels will be able to advocate more effectively for support or appropriate accommodation for their residents, since it is a language that commissioners, doctors, and policy makers respond to when allocating and prioritising health and social care provision.