This resource, the Delivering Hospital-Based Youth Work Guide, reflects the expertise of providers, distilling key learnings and examples of good practice for effective HBYW delivery.
The guide focuses on day-to-day delivery, summarising what practitioners have said works, what creates barriers, and practical tips for navigating common challenges. While this guide draws from London-based services, the learnings about working with young people impacted by violence and what’s needed for effective service delivery are relevant in other contexts.
It includes key insights, common barriers and good practice, which refers to approaches that have worked well and can be adapted to other contexts.
Shifting systems to embed and sustain hospital-based youth work
This final report on embedding and sustaining hospital-based youth workers makes 11 recommendations to overcome the structural and systemic issues that limit its integration nationwide.
The London Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) funds the Hospital-Based Youth Work (HBYW) programme, which places trained, specialist youth workers in A&E departments and Major Trauma Centres (MTCs) to support young people during moments of acute crisis.
Social Finance was commissioned as a Learning Partner, with support from Lennina Ofori of the Awareness TAP, to London’s VRU and the three youth work providers — St. Giles Trust, Oasis Youth Service and Catch22’s Redthread – from October 2023 to June 2025. This paper is a final output of that partnership, developed alongside the Delivering Hospital-Based Youth Work Guide, which summarises good practice.
Drawing on workshops, data reviews, and cross-sector engagement, it outlines how HBYW can be better embedded and sustained within the systems it operates in. It identifies the underlying systemic root issues limiting integration and offers eleven practical recommendations to embed HBYW more fully into local and national systems.
Applying a systems change lens, it complements existing guidance with the intention of making HBYW a vital part of support for young people impacted by violence.
Delivering Hospital-Based Youth Work Guide
Who is this guide for?
This guide is aimed primarily at practitioners and service providers delivering the HBYW, including service managers, team leads and practitioners. Effective service delivery involves a range of other roles within the service provider organisations, and also requires engagement with the wider support ecosystem for young people.
The guidance may also be useful for:
- Providers’ internal staff (e.g., Data Coordinators, HR teams)
- Hospital staff seeking to support the integration of the service into clinical and safeguarding pathways
- Commissioners looking to understand implementation realities and support effective service design
- Researchers and evaluators seeking to understand practitioner perspectives
About our role as learning partner
The capabilities required of a learning partner are:
- Impact-led design of learning activity. Ability to shape and adapt the mix of learning activities based on the objectives and priorities of the learning partnership.
- Curious inquiry. Strong analytical capability to identify barriers and enablers at all the relevant levels, alongside the relational skills needed to engage partners openly and credibly.
- Iterative, real-time learning. Ability to work iteratively, translating learning and insight into action as the work progresses, rather than capturing learning only after delivery has concluded.
- Convening and influence. Ability to bring partners together to surface shared learning, support collective reflection, and create the conditions for collaboration and system-level influence.