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Mental health outreach

May 01 2025

A day in the life of an outreach worker supporting homeless people’s access to mental health services. By Richard Wink


In a nutshell

  • Richard works with the People Sleeping Rough Team in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. The team does morning outreach connecting people sleeping rough with health services, especially ones providing mental health support. 
  • The team are proactive on outreach, aiming to reach as many under-served people within the community as possible. This is achieved through meeting people where they are, building trust, motivational interviewing and crisis intervention where necessary. 


Under overcast skies and the persistent squawk of hungry seagulls, I walk along the promenade on Great Yarmouth’s seafront. It’s part of our team’s daily outreach work. My jaunty stride hits the pavement hard. At certain points I will stop and look out towards the sea. At the beginning of my walk, just past the Venetian Gardens near the promenade, I will occasionally spot a tent across the sand dunes. To check to see if I can see what I think I’ve seen, I’ll get out a pocket telescope that I picked up on a whim online.

Squinting through the lens, I’ve not seen this tent before, so I walk across the dunes. Sand fills my trainers. When I get closer, I can see that the tent door is open, but no one is inside. All I can see is a scrunched-up grey hoodie, a sleeping bag and a couple of cider bottles. The job is like this, chasing shadows, often missing meeting with a person. I tuck a leaflet with contact details for our team under the tent, it flaps a bit in the strong cross breeze.

I get out my phone, take a picture and mark the location. I’ll circulate this information to other teams who support homeless people in the local area to hopefully find out if anyone knows who is sleeping here, and then maybe visit again later in the week. Part of the job is sharing information, making sure this person is known and someone is checking they are ok.

I work for the People Sleeping Rough Team based at Northgate Hospital. Our role is to support homeless people, and those with a dual diagnosis presentation, to access mental health support. The team is me, a psychological therapist, two mental health nurses and a peer support worker.

We attempt to work using Levy’s pre-treatment model. The outreach work that the team does proactively engages the service user. We are happy to meet with people where they are, they are, including visiting the camping site of someone who is street homeless, seeing them at a hostel, or meeting somewhere in the community such as the local library.

We endeavour to work towards building a therapeutic relationship, initially through rapport building, trying to develop an understanding of our service user’s frame of reference. We aspire to build trust as we often work with people who are distrustful of services or organisations like the NHS.

When the relationship is established, we use motivational interviewing techniques to set goals and help encourage positive change. This work is sometimes shared with professionals in the third sector such as the local addiction support service Change Grow Live. We also promote safety by applying crisis intervention and harm reduction strategies in the hope of providing the opportunity for positive change.

Later in the afternoon I meet with a service user for a therapy session back at Northgate Hospital. I reflect with this person how far they’ve come over the last year since we first met. This person was sleeping rough in the same dunes where I was earlier in the day. We made initial contact, worked with them to find temporary accommodation over winter at a B&B, and then, with added support from the local council, they were able to rent a room in the town centre. It sounds so simple when we gloss over these events, but there were challenges, many missed appointments, lapses with substance misuse, issues with the police. Change is not a linear process, but it is now occurring for this person.

As a team we just try to be consistent, we attempt to put a framework around the chaos and help people to make positive changes in their lives. There are battles to fight, and bumps along the way, but I think we are building a reputation as a group of people who care in our community, and that improves trust and positive engagement.

  • Richard Wink is a psychological therapist for the Rough Sleeping Team in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk.
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