HAGA - Community Team

Home Support

The Home Support team provides practical and emotional support for people who are trying to overcome an alcohol misuse problem but due to disability, age, specific cultural issues, psychological ill health or learning difficulties are unable to access mainstream services directly.

Workers visit people several times a week in the first few weeks until they develop other community links and increase their independence.

Each year our Community Detox Nurses help over 100 people undergo alcohol detoxification programmes in their own homes. Half of these soon start to use our other services – most usually the Day Programme.

We have seen an increase in people who are contemplating detox, but are just too chaotic to follow it through. They require intensive preparatory work to get to the point of starting a home detox, so the home support workers have taken a harm reduction approach to facilitate ongoing health improvements.

There are a growing number of elderly people on the caseload, probably due to our campaign to raise awareness of the impact of excessive drinking on both elderly people and their carers. The contact they have had with us has enabled some radical changes in lifestyle, including help with redesigning living space for ease of mobility and help with accessing sheltered housing.

Working with Social Services' Asylum Team we developed a range of community services for people from black and minority ethnic communities, including producing an information leaflet on sensible drinking in 18 community languages that has been distributed around the borough.

Outreach Service for Street Drinkers

The outreach service is a free and confidential service for street drinkers in Haringey.

Steve and Alistair have become experts on the lives and whereabouts of regular street drinkers, an exercise that has become more difficult recently.

“The recent changes in byelaws restricting public drinking in the borough have meant that, rather than going away, they’ve just gone somewhere else”, explained Steve.

“We’ve spent a lot of time building relationships with these guys,” he said, “and an encouraging number have taken up our offers of help to reduce or stop their drinking, and entered residential detox and rehab.”

A survey of the those who used HAGA’s service showed the main concerns of the Borough’s street drinkers to be; a safe place to drink, benefits problems, health, difficulty accessing other services and how to minimise the dangers they face.

“We responded by offering support with the practical issues,” says Steve, “We offer them advocacy on housing, help accessing primary care and set up links with other support groups. We’ve also linked up with the Haringey drug intervention team, the Police, and homeless services – which makes us all more effective.”

The workers have also set up links in local A&E departments and hospital wards to offer help to people who are being seen for alcohol related problems and have chaotic drinking histories. “Working with nursing and medical staff enables us offer support prior to and after discharge.” says Steve.

“Recently we met with local traders, to help them become more sensitive to the promotion and sale of alcohol to street drinkers and to alleviate concerns when dealing with them”.