Since 1989 Elmore has stayed true to our founding mission of supporting people with multiple and complex needs
Who does Elmore support?
Elmore works with some of the most complex people in the Thames Valley, and they often do not fit easily into services and can be hard to engage.
Elmore’s clients often have multiple separate support needs such as mental health issues, homelessness and rough sleeping, substance misuse, offending, physical disability, self-harm, learning difficulties, domestic abuse, sex working or experience of abuse and neglect.
Clients can find it difficult to fit easily into services for a range of reasons:
They may be too chaotic, so the services they need cannot cope. Elmore clients can have difficulties keeping appointments and may behave inappropriately when they manage to keep appointments.
They may be unwilling to engage. They may distrust statutory agencies and refuse services.
They may not fit referral criteria for services. People with a combination of issues can be the exception to somebody’s rule.
There may be confusion over which services should be involved. Multiple problems can result in multiple agencies getting involved.
Crises can shape people’s lives and result in a range of consequences including loss of housing and jobs, financial difficulty, and involvement with the criminal justice system. Self-harm, alcohol, and substances may be used by complex people supported by Elmore.
Elmore clients often have something important in common—for a range of reasons, they are not getting the services that they need, when they need them.
How does Elmore work?
Elmore’s flexible approach seeks to engage people with multiple support needs who may slip through the net of services to make a positive impact on their lives. We seek to address each of the reasons why people may not fit easily into services and can be hard to engage.
Elmore clients typically benefit from longer-term interactions, which can be different to the experience of many well-developed services for mental health issues which have been developed around a model that relies on short interventions.
Initial approaches may be rejected.
The Elmore worker will persevere, trying out different tactics to engage the person and build up their trust, possibly for the first time, in an agency. This build-up of trust will help to deliver positive outcomes for the Elmore client and the overall support system in the longer-term, which means that work can sometimes go at a slower pace. Our impact will be a ‘slower-burn’ one of increased time needed to achieve useful outcomes with people with complex support needs.
Elmore persistently tries to engage people and make all potential avenues for treatment and support open and accessible to them. It is routinely Elmore’s role to make sense of the range of agencies that might be able to offer a relevant service, and to support people to access them.