This paper is one of a series of six commissioned by Pathway to inform policy development through the NHS 10-year plan and the cross-Government homelessness strategy.
Drawing on the expertise of our Pathway Fellows, other experts, and our colleagues with lived experience of homelessness, each paper identifies actionable policies for change. All the papers underline the importance of a preventative approach, prioritising action which stops social and economic disadvantage leading to exclusion, collapsing health and early mortality.
You can watch the launch of our Policy Papers for Inclusion Health here…..
1,474 Reasons to Act: Adult Safeguarding & Inclusion Health
When introduced the 2014 Care Act represented a seismic shift in social care, but ten years on it is clear that the Act has been unsuccessful in meeting the needs of health inclusion populations.
The discrete needs and experiences of inclusion health populations remain, at best, on the peripheries of mainstream safeguarding policy and practice. At worst, the complex co-morbidities and overlapping needs of people living with multiple disadvantage are ignored and stigmatised.
There is clear evidence that the current law and policy framework is insufficient to enable the delivery of best practice, as well as for the severe harm being done by these failings.
In this paper Gill Taylor calls for urgent action to be taken. She sets out a number of key opportunities to embed effective, personalised safeguarding as a unifying driver for preventing and responding to extreme health inequalities, including high rates of premature death.
About the author
Gill Taylor is Pathway UK Fellow for Safeguarding and Systems Change, with 20 years experience working in homelessness and inclusion health. She specialises in approaches to safeguarding that centre lived experience, anti-oppressive practice and integrated systems change.
Gill is a Safeguarding Adult Review author, independent researcher and systems facilitator and Strategic Lead for the Museum of Homelessness Dying Homeless Project. She has recently published the Radical Safeguarding Toolkit – Homelessness.