Mental health and bars of soap: the nurses helping Logan’s homeless

A TEAM of mental health nurses from Logan Hospital is covering 4500 square kilometres a day to find and protect the city’s homeless.

But their leader says the crisis appears to be worsening, with three new homeless encampments emerging in the last week.

Kevin Landles and his team of seven specialise in supporting people aged 18 to 75 who are experiencing homelessness and living with mental illness or addiction.

They are known as the Homeless Health Outreach Team, or HHOT, and they focus on meeting rough sleepers where they are – whether that is a forest campsite, creekside tent, a public park of makeshift shelter.

But in a city like Logan, which is home to several popular tent cities and hundreds of homeless – including at Hugh Muntz, Tully Memorial, Gould Adams and Meakin parks – Mr Landles said he and his team keep busy.

Sometimes the role means helping a rough sleeper medically, and other times it’s simply giving them a bar of soap. Either way, Mr Landles said it was a rewarding job.

“The team is supposed to concentrate on people who have a mental illness that is diagnosed and are also homeless,” he said.

“But of course, we found that if we’re out there and we’re looking after our 100 clients who have a mental illness and are also homeless, we come across another 500 people who are homeless and at risk of developing a mental illness.

“We open cases judiciously, but we support 100% of the people we encounter. That support can be emotional support, or it can be practical support like [donating] tent, bottled water, food supplies, clothing. We pull from all of the NGOs in our district to get that practical support out to the people.”

Mr Landles has been in the job for 12 months.

Until December last year, the majority of homeless people seeking help would have to visit the team at its Logan Central clinic.

Now HOTT is 75% outreach, with a footprint that stretches from Sunnybank in the north, west beyond Boonah, east to Mount Cotton and south to the New South Wales border.

Their day typically starts at at dawn, with the team reviewing cases and eventually splitting into pairs to cover more ground.

They provide clinical support, food and water drops, hygiene and first aid supplies, and assist with everything from housing applications to administering depot medications in the field.

They even carry out “discovery outreach” missions, following tips from rangers or police, and are sometimes the first to encounter families with young children, sometimes as young a three years old, living in unsafe, hidden conditions like “the middle of the forest”.

Mr Landles said the biggest challenge for local rough sleepers was finding housing.

“The availability of housing in Logan with the rising cost of rentals, it just makes it out of reach. It’s impossible for these people to actually obtain housing,” he said.

The team noticed this was only exacerbated by Cyclone Alfred, which “destroyed” campsites and most rough sleepers’ possessions.

“In the last week, we found three brand new encampments in the Logan area – one in Woodridge, one in Springwood, one in Logan Central – of people who are without any form of accommodation,” Mr Landles said.

“They are sleeping on benches. They are sleeping in homemade shelters.”

He said there were about 26 homeless people who appeared on HHOT’s radar in the last week.

The team can have a client list of between 60-80 people at any given time. But they’re also helping hundreds of others without diagnosed mental illnesses, receiving about 250 calls for support a week.

Mr Landles said homlessness was a heartbreaking issue often “tucked away” in Logan, but something that could impact anyone.

“We’ve got a mantra within the team that every single one of us is two paychecks away from homelessness.

“Because if you miss two paychecks – you’re redundant or you’re unemployed for any given reason – how many resources do you have to keep your house, to keep your car, to keep food on the table?

“These people are no different. We have college professors, we have retired doctors, we have engineers who have had some pretty rough breaks in life. Everything falls apart and they go from living in a house in a very nice suburb, to sleeping in Hugh Muntz Park at Beenleigh.”