A room of one's own

Targeted partnerships with health and housing providers can build the trust needed to deliver services to our community’s most vulnerable populations

LinkPeople is a housing provider specialising in supporting people who have experienced mental health and addiction issues and homelessness into stable housing.Contracted to deliver outreach, Housing First and Rapid Rehousing services in south Auckland, our team has close relationships of trust with rough sleepers and some of our community’s most vulnerable people.

Not what you think....

A common misconception is that our workforce focus is just on supporting people into housing. Yes, the initial goal is to secure a warm, dry, safe home. But once people have a home, our focus pivots to ensuring people can hold onto their tenancy and thrive.

Sustaining a tenancy involves whānau setting goals related to addressing the reasons they became homeless. The reasons are often complex and underpinned by significant intergenerational trauma.

Understanding this, Cause Collective mobile health clinic Te Iti Pounamu Hauora Mobile Health Service (TiPH), and LinkPeople successfully applied to the Auckland Council Homelessness Local Innovation and Partnership Fund to support a structured partnership to enable people living in LinkPeople properties, and those currently rough sleeping to access crucial health services.

...nor as simple as it looks

At the time, we thought the partnership was simple. We were supporting a community of people with high and complex health needs, who had barriers to accessing health services, including lack of transport, enrolment and sometimes access to resources like a phone to make appointments. Te Iti Pounamu Hauora are flexible, mobile and have a team of values-based health professionals with the expertise to work with our community.

Deep understanding

We expected the referrals to quickly roll in. But they didn’t… well not initially. What our leadership came to realise was for the partnership to work, our housing support workforce needed to build a deeper understanding of and connection with Te Iti Pounamu Hauora.

Solid connections

Our team is by community, for the community. They care about people deeply and are tenacious advocates. They have also had to deal with the disappointment of seeing a person – in our service or in their own whānau – getting to that critical stage where they are ready to seek support for their addiction or mental health challenges, only to find, there are more hoops to jump through.

Trust is key

The trust we have developed with people we support is through being reliable, consistent and honest. We do what we say we will do. When our frontline workers connect people to another service, it makes a difference if they have had previous experiences with the service, that they know the service is respectful and meet the needs of people with complex backgrounds and sometimes challenging behaviours.

As the relationships between our services grew, referrals quickly started to flow in. It was clear that Te Iti Pounamu Hauora (TiPH) delivers a mana enhancing service and is well positioned to meet the needs of our kiritaki. Our community – frontline kaimahi and people who had accessed services – began to recommend the health service. Word spread across our complexes and within the rough sleeper community.

We could rely on TiPH to provide excellent accessible respectful health support; in turn they could rely on us to help them build relationships and ensure that people got to their specialist appointments. Critical health inventions have been made.

Recommendation

Structured partnerships between housing support services and health providers offer untapped potential to deliver services to some of our most vulnerable communities.

While service design and accessibility are crucial the magic ingredient to engage “hard to reach” people is trust. Trust can be expeditated through partnering intentionally with services, like ours, who have long-term, close relationships with people and our communities.

Our ask is that as NGOs we band together to maximise our impact and support people to live well and thrive in their homes and communities.

LinkPeople also works in partnership with Workwise to deliver employment outcomes. You can read more about that in the article A Fine Balance by Tyron Pini.

Rough sleeper health - the facts

The average life expectancy of someone experiencing chronic homelessness is 55 years. That’s over 20 years less than the average New Zealander.

Rough sleepers are often ‘tri-morbid’, meaning that they have a physical health challenge, a mental health challenge, and an addiction. Common physical health conditions include Hepatitis C, which is at least a thousand times more common in rough sleepers than in New Zealanders as a whole.

If rough sleepers or people who have experienced homelessness aren’t engaged with a GP, they are likely to end up needing emergency health services, for example an ambulance or presenting at A&E.

The Auckland Council funded Ira Mata, Ira Tangata: Auckland’s Homeless Count found that over the previous 12 months 54% of people experiencing homelessness had visited a hospital emergency department, 18% visited a hospital emergency department more than 10 times and 41% had to be admitted to hospital.

Use the comments box below, to let us have your opinion on we can work together to deliver the dignity that is having somewhere safe to live,

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