Front Door Wolverhampton Overarching Service Pathway

Front Door Wolverhampton is a pilot project for people who are homeless or vulnerable, and it developed out of the Community Asset Feasibility study (CAFs). CAFs was commissioned by the Wolverhampton Neighbourhood Renewal Board and completed by the Wolverhampton Policy and Research Institute. The overarching recommendation of CAFs was that it was now important to join up homeless and allied services and to devise smarter ways for services to work together. The intention being to ensure higher quality services for homeless and vulnerable groups. Front Door Wolverhampton has taken up this challenge and developed integrated care/service pathways as one way to meet these objectives. The use of integrated care/service pathways in a non-health-care setting is to the project's knowledge, unique (Figure 1).

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Figure 1

Care pathway journey

Front Door Wolverhampton followed a standard approach to process mapping. This involved a series of mapping exercise afternoons with representation from a wide cross-section of service users and service providers. This ensured the production of shared pathways that are appropriate for use in a wide range of settings. Front Door Wolverhampton soon acknowledged that homeless and vulnerable people have such complex and varied needs that writing a single pathway is not possible. The answer to this was to write a pathway for initial assessment of need and then to have a spectrum of pathways to fit the service user's complexity.

We have primarily looked at initial presentation as the entry point to the pathways for the service user. In the first assessment, personal and essential information is captured to define needs and future services required. The project goes on to use specific pathways that are selected depending on the service users’ needs and the relative priority of those needs. For example, a service user may be homeless, rough sleeping and the immediate need may be a hostel place. A secondary need may be for a legal acceptable identity so that the client can then make a statutory homeless application.

Front Door Wolverhampton has devised specific pathways in partnership for the following needs:

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debt

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access to health-care

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drug treatment access (including alcohol)

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homelessness

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identity building.

The pathways were piloted for a three-month period and reviewed within this time. A process of continual improvement of the pathways has been followed. The project is now in the process of consulting with other agencies within Wolverhampton, as to how best to share and more widely deliver this potentially very valuable model.

A copy of the initial pathway is shown in Appendix 1.

How to Use this Pathway

Any person working within homeless or vulnerable people's services can use this pathway. All the information needed is given by the client, and the assessment follows a client-centred approach.

At any variance stage, a code should be entered in the tracking form to ensure that the pathway can be audited.