Staff from the NHS and charities across Mansfield helped more than 50 street sleepers at a Street Health event.

For the last 18 months the Street Health team has brought professionals together from across Mansfield and organised regular events that provide clothes, sleeping bags and health checks – on one of the Mondays that Bridge Street Methodist Church holds its soup kitchen – for vulnerable people living on the street.

Partners to the project are:

Bridge Street Methodist Church

Sherwood Forest Hospitals, which organised the Street Health event and provided dietary advice, minor injury advice, sexual health advice and fresh fruit

Nottinghamshire Healthcare, providing footcare

Roundwood Surgery, helping give flu vaccinations and prescriptions

Change Grow Live, providing liver scanning, wound support and advice on alcohol and drug misuse
Hairdressers from the Full Monty Barber shop in Chesterfield

Everyone who helped with donations of food, clothes and toiletries, including staff from Sherwood Forest Hospitals, Caroline Boole, Steph Haslam and Ali Pipes from Mansfield and Ashfield CCG, and Patricia Brown and her team from Woodland GP practice

One man, who has been attending the Street Health events since they started and has been homeless for nearly four years, said: “Without this I’d be lost. It’s easier to come here and see a doctor. I went to the hospital and I heard one of them call me a ‘typical drug user’ because I had a needle stuck in my foot. You don’t hear that here, they don’t talk about you like that.”

Suzanne Banks, chief nurse at SFH, said: “When we started this, what became clear to us was that even as health professionals we didn’t know all the different organisations or support that was out there. If we didn’t, how could we expect vulnerable people on the street to understand and access them?

“The Street Health events are a way to simplify this by bringing the services to them and from this hoping we all can build relationships and help these vulnerable and often overlooked members of our community.”