Hope House Hertfordshire
It is with great pleasure that Safer Places can announce the opening, Tuesday 7th May of Hertfordshire’s first specialist complex needs refuge, Hope House Hertfordshire. Safer Places in partnership with Hertfordshire county council were successful in obtaining funding for this innovative service through the MHCLG for 18 months.
Hertfordshire Hope House is a complex needs refuge of 4 units exclusively for Hertfordshire female victims of Domestic Abuse who, owing to additional support needs, may typically find it difficult to access refuge. This refuge will:
- Be staffed by a multi-agency team on 24/7 basis
- Accept referrals from all areas of the county
- Work with the service user, and any agency with which she is already involved, to arrange safe travel to the service following referral.
Every client will have an individualised programme with personal goals. Service users will benefit from a routine with set activities, daily house meetings, one to one support sessions, group programmes (including the Safer Places accredited CBT based Triple R programme) and other therapeutic activities which focus on recovery and resilience building. Part of the Hope house model involves enabling clients to make their voices heard and to help shape services for future service users – this is something that proved particularly successful in Safer Places’ Essex pilot of the Hope House model.
The service aims to
- Reach and respond effectively to women who are victims of domestic abuse who also have additional needs, which may typically prevent them from accessing refuge
- Provide a place of safety for a group of high risk/high need service users
- Ensure that service users receive well-coordinated packages of support, designed to respond to their individual needs
- Ensure that on leaving the refuge, clients are already linked with organisations which will be part of their continuing support journey
- Develop an evidence base of the needs of domestic abuse victims with additional needs to inform future commissioning
- Improve multi-agency working for victims with additional support needs
- Save and transform lives in the short and longer term
Within the Hope house model we need to achieve buy – in from clients to take part in a weekday programme with weekends free to do what they would like. All potential clients will need to have in addition to our normal referral pathway a secondary assessment to ensure we have all the information to support safely and risk assess appropriately, we hope to do this in person but where we cannot we will arrange for a one night’s stay in our interim accommodation to ensure that we can assess the suitability of the project and programme with the client. If the client is deemed suitable they will be admitted to Hope house to begin the programme. If the client is not suitable as this may be due to case mix at time of referral Hope house staff will support the client on their onward journey and will allow up to a 7 night stay if risk assessment allows.
To refer into the new service please contact our Gateway on 03301 025811, staff will then be able to start the assessment process with your potential referral.