On 30th September 2024, CHAD and the Faculty of Public Health hosted this webinar with Professor Michelle Cornes, Professor of Health and Social Policy Inequalities at the University of Salford and Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Policy Institute at King’s College London.
Michelle is a leading expert on this important topic and has worked on improving hospital discharge arrangements for people experiencing homelessness since 2015. Michelle started by giving a helpful and comprehensive overview of the long-term endeavour to end discharge to the street. Dating back to 2012, Michelle outlined key developments in research and funding landscape, and explained the Discharge to Assess (D2A) operating model.
During the presentation, Michelle shared key learning from the evaluation of the Out-of-Hospital Care Models Programme for People Experiencing Homelessness. That evaluation was funded by the Department of Health and Social Care and covered 21 test sites across England (2021-2023). To find out more about that work, please visit: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/oohcm-evaluation.
Michelle discussed some of the challenges funding and sustaining services longer-term. She highlighted that, despite the evidence projects had about their effectiveness, they struggled to get funding to continue. Michelle ended by setting out the next steps and emphasised that here is more to do around how to stop the ‘lighthouse effect’ that comes with short-term funding.
View/download the speakers slides here.
A recording of the webinar is available below.
