The long journey home: understanding and improving the supported housing system for people living with mental illness

Too many individuals are having poor experiences during, before and after their time in supported housing, with many also struggling to access these services in the first place. This report from Rethink Mental Illness aims to get to grips with the challenges and barriers that people with severe mental illness face as they navigate these services, and their causes.  

The report is based on a system model developed by New Philanthropy Capital, to help in understanding the complexity of systems, such as the NHS, social care, and housing, and how these interact, and its key findings are around missed opportunities for prevention, parts of the system that aren’t joined up, environments or support available that is only of a poor quality and poorly managed transitions sometimes resulting in people losing access to support, damaging recovery and sometimes resulting in readmission.

The report also identifies five enablers, changes to policy or ways of working that show potential for delivering a better system and the authors stress that they hope to provoke further discussion about possible solutions.