Shared Health Foundation is a philanthropically funded CIC working to address health inequalities exacerbated by poverty. In response to growing concerns about standards in temporary accommodation, the Foundation launched a Homeless Families project, a service supporting homeless families and pregnant women placed in emergency and temporary accommodation in Oldham. From its inception, the service was based on the Focused Care model and was informed by midwifery frameworks and principles. Committed to reducing health inequalities, the service looked upstream to mitigate the negative impact of homelessness. Shared Health’s trauma-informed, practice-based evidence, along with its specialist clinical insights, brought together a multi-disciplinary team, and we have shone a spotlight on the preventable health inequalities which can be affected by homelessness.
Rising concerns regarding the deepening housing crisis are being voiced by professionals and service providers across hospital waiting rooms, social and educational settings, and the weight of those who fall through the net is increasingly being met by charity and faith sector organisations. There is a deep sense of foreboding and urgent need to redress our existing systems, not by “throwing the baby out with the bath water” but by collating the wisdom from practice-based evidence and realigning the provision of services with the voice of the child at its heart.
This report aims to present the findings of Shared Health when examining the impact of local authority provision for homeless families through a maternal and reproductive health inequalities lens. Our service for families without a stable home identified a disproportionate number of women, many experiencing pregnancy alongside homelessness.
The work on the ground is led by a registered midwife with 25 years’ experience working in areas of deprivation and consequently provides a unique midwifery-informed approach at our base called “The Crib”. The service receives referrals from the local authority in one of Greater Manchester’s most deprived boroughs, and we respond and offer support to those families with children, prioritising pregnant women and those with preschool children. Their lived experiences inform the service and how it responds to meet our guiding principle of health equity. We value co-production, and Shared Health wish to honour the incredible resilience of our families and their dedication to support our work and the compassion they show for others who are also in the journey themselves. With their consent, this report will ensure their stories are told, their voices are heard, and the whisper of the unborn is echoed.
