HoPe-CaRe Intervention update - 9th May, 2025

Published on Jun 30, 2025

HoPe-CaRe Intervention Update – breaking the cycle of homelessness in severe mental illness!

On 9th May, 2025 we concluded the 12-month care phase, for the 7th of the patient-cohort picked from the street on 10/5/24, for the "homeless mentally ill persons care and rehabilitation" (HoPe-CaRe) Intervention.

The patient is one of the 2 Intervention patients that were reunited with family members following hospital discharge.

The 12-month duration HoPe-CaRe intervention which was executed with the Ember Mental Health Financial Award 2023, by The SHM Foundation UK, kicked off on 20/4/23.

Seven (7) patients were picked from the streets of Abeokuta between April 2023 and May 2024. Patients were presented for inpatient care at the FNPH Aro Abeokuta. The average duration of hospital stay was 5.51 months and the last patient discharged on 20th November 2024.

Two of the patients a male and a female were successfully reunited with family members while 5 had to be taken into Hope Resource, a supported accommodation run by Hope Restoration and Health Initiative. Attempt made to reunite another patient with her widowed mother failed with resultant deterioration of patient clinical state (after 3-week home return) attributed to poor medication supervision by mother. Patient had to be readmitted to the hospital for restabilisation following which she was discharged to Hope Resource.

We are happy to report that the 5 residents at Hope Resource have maintained stable mental state with regular hospital follow-up visits. They are making progress in their recovery journey along with other 11, but their community reintegration had been hampered by the continued non-engagement of traced family members.

In the course of our floating community supervision of the two reunited patients, we discovered that one (RG, a female, now living with husband and children), who was admitted to the hospital from the street on 13th December 2023, and discharged to family members on 5th April 2024, had defaulted follow up clinic for about 4 months, after 8 months of regular attendance.
Reason for default was their inability to continue to bear the financial costs of follow up clinic and medication. The family was further counselled, and encouraged with the offer of financial assistance to resume follow-up clinic attendance and purchase of medication.

This further confirms our intervention hypothesis regarding family burden of care, and the resultant homelessness in severe mental illness. We had opined that being discharged from barely affordable mental hospital admission with nowhere to go, or to become dependent on families who struggle to provide support, puts these individuals at huge risk of further relapses, hindering illness recovery journey, and repaving the path to homelessness.

This underscores the need for a more accessible, acceptable and affordable mental health service delivery in the country.