A friend in a storm: helping tenants who are struggling with their mental health

Open to anyone aged 18 or over and living in a WDH property, the project aims to cut NHS costs by reducing the need for tenants to access the GP, A&E, and secondary mental health and crisis services. For the landlord, it supports tenancy sustainment.

“Basically, it’s estate management in a different guise,” says David Thorpe, adaptations and well-being manager at WDH.

“We invest upfront in the customer and maintaining that property so they have the best possible chance in life and they are able to sustain that home. It’s a prevention rather than cure scenario.”

The funding provides for three navigators – occupational therapists, social workers or nurses – although there are currently only two in post, with WDH looking to recruit a third.

South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust employs the navigators and provides clinical supervision, while WDH manages the workers on a day-to-day basis within its wider well-being team, which also employs five well-being caseworkers to deal with issues, including alcohol and substance misuse.

The team receives referrals from different parts of the business (all WDH frontline staff have a referral form on their mobile device) and external organisations already working with a tenant. Alternatively, tenants can refer themselves. The staff then “triage” the person to the most appropriate service.

When a potential mental health issue is flagged, a navigator works with a tenant to complete a risk assessment and decide the best way forward. Anxiety and depression are the most common issues, accounting for 47% of the 163 cases referred to the service in the third quarter of 2019/20. Trauma and bereavement are among other issues faced.

Mr Lockwood says a typical referral might be somebody having issues with their neighbours or struggling to pay the rent. A tenant might be feeling low or anxious about their situation and stop going out. “They can make comments like, ‘I’d be better off dead,’” says Mr Lockwood.

“We do have people who have self-harmed or have taken overdoses in response to their social situation.”

The navigator might suggest low-level coping strategies, such as distraction techniques to deal with self-harm or desensitisation work for anxiety management. If a tenant’s level of need is higher than what WDH can provide, the navigator can signpost them to other services offering help, including talk therapy, counselling and bereavement support.

Educating tenants about other services and steps they can take is key, says Mr Lockwood. It’s giving people “the information to help themselves”.

He says one of the advantages of the project is that the navigators visit tenants at home, “whereas a lot of services insist that you visit them”.

“For a lot of these people who are struggling to get out of the house, sometimes we are the first person they have seen in a number of months or actually spoken to about their problems,” says Mr Lockwood.

Typically a navigator works one-on-one with a tenant on a fortnightly basis, with the average length of intervention running at 55 days in the third quarter of 2019/20. John says only seeing Mr Lockwood once every two weeks “wasn’t ideal”. “Obviously once a week or even twice a week would be better,” he says.

But John says it was “superb” to have the support he did receive. He says Mr Lockwood helped him “in every aspect” of his life, not only with his well-being but also by referring him to WDH’s financial advice service, Cash Wise, and making sure issues with his bedsit, such as damp and outstanding repairs, were resolved.

While one in four people in the general UK population will experience a mental health problem each year, one in three people living in social housing experience issues. “Contributing factors range from housing associations not upholding their duty to provide good housing, to the uncertainty around not having a stable and secure home and being placed somewhere away from family and friends – all of which can contribute towards poor mental health,” says David Stephenson, senior policy and campaigns officer at mental health charity Mind.