Our team carried out a desk top review of all available information on housing and health services available for homeless people in the North East London (NEL) area focussing on three main groups – those who are rough sleeping or temporarily housed in hostels, those housed in temporary accommodation for homeless families, and those housed in hotels or dispersed accommodation for refugees and asylum seekers.

We conducted a good practice literature review of health outreach services for homeless people across the UK. This identified three main approaches, hub services, GP led services, and nurse-led services. We interviewed around 60 health and housing and voluntary sector professions across the NEL footprint and seven boroughs to complete our mapping of services available.

We also obtained feedback from user led and grass roots services on their clients experiences of trying to access health services as well as their core health needs and the main barriers they experienced.

We reviewed existing service contracts and specifications and evaluated available data on the different populations of homeless people in the area covered by NEL. A key part of our research was understanding the likely size of the homeless population by triangulating a number of different data sets.