Our Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership’s (HSCP) Complex Needs team has recently celebrated their one-year anniversary since launching the innovative new service in March 2022.  

The Complex Needs Service was launched as a brand new outreach model that aims to provide a specialist, highly personalised service for individuals presenting with multiple and complex health and social care needs who aren’t engaging with mainstream services in Glasgow. 

The Complex Needs Service serves as the interface between Homelessness, Alcohol and Drug Recovery, Mental Health and Justice Services in Glasgow City. 

The Complex Needs Service replaced the Homeless Health Service model, including criteria, and now focuses on complexity and risk rather than homelessness status alone. This service model works by listening to the views and experiences of individuals with lived experience, which help shape supports and future developments. 

Since the launch of the service, the team has gone through triumphs, challenges and changes navigating how to continue to be innovative while delivering an effective service. 

When asked about their biggest challenge since the launch, Lisa Ross, Service Manager for Complex Needs, said: “I think that the biggest challenge for us was the level of complexity of referrals that we started to receive. We started to receive referrals for individuals that we have never worked with previously, from services that we have never worked with. It took us some time to process that, and although it was initially challenging, it was in some way reassuring in terms of the gap that had existed for people with multiple complexities and the requirement for a service such as ours.”

The Complex Needs Service is the first of its kind for the city and has been setting standards on how to support those in the community that have trouble accessing and engaging with mainstream health and social care services. The service is now a fully psychologically and trauma informed service with a person-centred approach at the very heart of it.

During its first year, the Complex Needs team worked hard to make a difference for their service users. Lisa Ross said: “We know that people who use our service feel valued and listened to; they also know that we’ll not give up on them, no matter how challenging that might be. We’re able to monitor outcomes and improvements in relation to health and social care, which we’re able to achieve because we provide so many specialities within the one service.”

As part of their one-year celebrations, the service hosted a tea party to thank staff and to allow them to reflect back on the achievements of the service and the future ahead. 

Given its innovative model, the service has had high levels of interest since its launch from services across Scotland and the UK who are hoping to develop their own version of a Complex Needs model. 

Looking to the future, the team is still working on developing the new service model in partnership with other teams and external agencies to be able to contribute across multiple services and directorates. 

Lisa Ross added: “I’m so proud of the whole team within the Complex Needs Service. When I look back to last March, although we felt prepared for the launch, it soon after started to feel like we were taking a bit of a leap into the unknown! This resulted in almost constant changes for the team but everyone embraced every change and continues to do so. They’ve worked so hard and completely supported the new model. I could not have asked any more of the team and it’s because of the team that I have that we’re able to get the outcomes for service users that we do.”