A person I know had his marriage break down and that put him straight into a hostel that wasn’t suitable for him at all. 

There was lots of violence and lots of drug taking and alcohol abuse going on. It was the type of life he had managed to escape – and for him, being around that again exposed him to potential disaster. There are other hostels that would have been more suitable that he could have been put into, but he wasn’t, and I think it’s because he’s an abrasive sort of character. 

This is just one example of many that I’ve seen that show me that the system works on a personal basis fuelled by personal bias and not a needs basis. In other words, some people are favoured because they know someone or because they are a certain type of person.  

The problems with doing things in this way are obvious. People don’t get the type of help they need and when this happens, they suffer. Instead of fixing up they can fall apart, costing them personally and the system financially and in terms of capacity too. If you think about it, a person who falls apart will need help for longer, taking that help from someone else who may benefit from it. If the system is stretched, capacity is challenged, and the standard of care suffers, meaning people are more likely to fall apart. 

A system that is based on a personal basis, rather than needs, is likely to create a cycle of chaos.  

The guy I’m talking about got what he needed after I worked with him for just six weeks. Because I knew how to go about getting him the help he needed, by pushing the right buttons and knowing what to ask for, he was offered a move on flat. I put some pressure on the council and talked to the right people and yep, he was offered a one bed flat. This should have been done automatically because of the position he was in.  

First off I had to tell the support workers at his hostel what to ask for and how to ask for it and then I had to go into my office and tell them to put pressure on the right people in the council, the people who are high up on the pathways, so that they could pinpoint him as a person that needed the type of help he ended up getting.  

In the meantime, he should have been put in a B&B until the flat came up so he didn’t have to be around the culture of casual drug taking and pervasive violence that he had managed to recover from. 

 Photo by Mat Amp Instagram @matamp67