Redbridge homeless charity receives funding to deliver mobile healthcare

Homeless community group, Healthy Living Healthy Lives CIC, has received £10,000 of National Lottery funding to create a mobile consulting room to deliver healthcare to people who are homeless across Redbridge.

The new mobile consultation room is the first of its kind in the region, and will cover all aspects of health needs including physical, mental, emotional and public health as well as signposting to other agencies when needed.

The group aim to have the van in operation within the next few months, helping around 350 individuals that are currently homeless in Redbridge.

Stephanie O’Leary, Founder and Homeless Healthcare Manager at Healthy Living Healthy Lives, said: ‘We are working on the ground right now, dealing with people on the streets where the environment isn’t clean, and there is nowhere suitable to do a consultation. We’ve done consultations on the street and even under flyovers as we go to where our clients are.

‘This funding for a mobile consulting room will make such a massive difference because we will have everything we need in one place. It will be a clean, confidential space for us to continue our vital work for the homeless community of Redbridge.’

The health service is made up of a team of nurses, mental health nurses, counsellors and a podiatrist.

Stephanie added: ‘We support between 150 to 200 individuals and provide over 3,000 individual consults per year so the mobile consulting room will be helping hundreds of people in the community every year.

‘The service we provide is so incredibly important, if we weren’t there, people that are homeless wouldn’t be getting registered with GPs, wouldn’t be getting the healthcare they are currently getting because they don’t know how to access it. We are the advocates for these people, making sure there is equality of access to healthcare and that’s why we set up the organisation to begin with.

‘We wouldn’t be where are we are without National Lottery funding, it really is as simple as that. The funding allows us to operate, and this recent grant has been vital.’

Photo by Dimi Katsavaris