HOMELESS people are getting help from nurses, but a catalogue of problems are still not being catered for, says Nursing Standard (Nov 28).

A report from the Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI), On the Ground: Mapping Homeless Healthcare, indicates that pregnant women are sleeping rough and are denied access to housing. And problems with mental health or substance misuse often go unsolved.

The QNI surveyed 100 of the 300 nurses affiliated to its homeless health initiative. Two thirds of them had not received appropriate training.

Jane Cook, a nurse adviser at Hillingdon Primary Care Trust, says that some nursing students need training because they are prejudiced against homeless asylum-seekers. She says: “I was training a group of students and half of them said that asylum-seekers should be sent back home.” Cook says that hospitals often have poor discharge policies. (The Government says that patients should not be discharged from hospital to the streets or unsuitable accommodation.)

“I met a man who had been sleeping on the street after 284 admissions to A&E. He had never had a proper discharge. It was like a revolving door.”

Health visitors will face more work because some homeless patients have no one to turn to after they are deregistered by GPs, says Jane Gray, a consultant nurse for the Leicester Homeless Healthcare service. Gray tells Independent Nurse (Nov 26) that nurses in some areas were put in post as “tokenism to tick an inequalities box”.

The good news is that the QNI has won a £350,000 lottery grant to produce best practice guidelines for nurses working with homeless people, to supply health promotion materials and to campaign for more training.

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