Produced by Katy Hetherington, programme manager, NHS Health Scotland and Neil Hamlet, consultant in public health medicine, NHS Fife, the report brings together the academic evidence and the service experience within Scotland to provide a route map for Public Health to engage fully in the prevention and mitigation of homelessness and its health consequences.

The role of the report is to revisit the NHS’s role in improving the health of homeless people, particularly given the opportunities that health and social care integration offers, and to explore the opportunities for the NHS to play a full role in the prevention of homelessness.

Among its recommendations is that NHS Boards should consider the inclusion of homelessness prevention and mitigation actions within new or existing Health Inequalities Strategies.

It also calls on the Scottish Government to embed housing-related measures into the future health inequalities focussed Health Promoting Health Service (HPHS) and to drive forward the importance of the links between ‘home’ and health via the existing Ministerial oversight of the HPHS activity.