Mental Health Awareness Week: New research announcement

Published: 16th May 2023
This Mental Health Awareness Week (15-19 May), Look Ahead and our partner the Wates Family Enterprise Trust are pleased to announce further research into the role of community-based supported housing in meeting the needs of young people recovering from a mental health crisis.

The team from Look Ahead's Tower Hamlets Rehab Service.

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week and we’re delighted to share the news that following the launch of our ‘Away from Hospital and into the Community’ report in January, we’ve been awarded additional funding from the Wates Family Enterprise Trust. This funding will allow us to implement, trial and evaluate the model of community-based housing for young people experiencing mental health crisis that the report recommended.

Never before has there been more need for this type of support. Young people and expert mental healthcare staff interviewed as part of our report told us that patients are unlikely to receive in-patient mental health care unless they “have attempted suicide multiple times”. More recently another report in the Guardian found that 250,000 young people have been unable to obtain support from the NHS.

Felicity Mallam, Executive Director of the Wates Family Enterprise Trust says “We are really pleased to be supporting Look Ahead with this programme of activity as part of the Trust’s work supporting key issues in housing. The NHS is seeing an unprecedented demand for mental health services, and families and young people are at their wits end. We’re looking forward to working with Look Ahead on the second wave of this programme so that we can all learn more about how best to support young people in the community in the face of such escalating need”.