Until last September I had never spent quite so much time in a hospital, and telling friends I can't make something because I'm in hospital has a way of generating concern that requires considerably more explanation than it should. I have been working as a volunteer legal adviser with the Health and Housing Project, run by the King's Legal Clinic, where law students work alongside the Homeless Team at King's College Hospital, a multidisciplinary team of social workers, support workers and healthcare professionals. We are supervised by Jo Underwood, a housing solicitor and lecturer in the clinic.
The project grew out of the research Jo and her colleagues published in October 2025, the Closed Doors report, which found that only three of London's 33 boroughs still offer a walk-in service for people who need to make homeless applications. As councils have moved to online and telephone-first models following funding cuts, people without phone or internet access have increasingly turned to A&E for housing as well as medical support. The cost of an NHS bed in London ranges between £400 - £1,000 a night, and around two thirds of delayed discharges involve unresolved housing issues, with some patients remaining on the ward for months after being medically fit to leave, while local authorities establish eligibility for statutory homelessness services, or arrange packages of care.
Every Wednesday starts with a handover covering new admissions, overnight referrals, and the more complex cases that have been ongoing for months. From there, the day is as unpredictable as the people who walk into the emergency department. Finding your way around the hospital is an adventure in itself, given that it is an enormous building and orientation has never been a particular strength of mine.
No two cases are the same, from advising on an unlawful eviction to drafting a pre-action letter challenging a refusal to carry out a Care Act assessment. That said, not all of it is law. It is tempting, arriving as a law student, to see everything as a problem with a legal solution waiting to be found, and sometimes it is. But many of the people you meet have spent long enough filling in forms and repeating themselves to different professionals that they have stopped expecting anyone to actually listen.
Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is pull up a chair and ask how they are holding up. On one occasion, a few words of Arabic I had picked up during my degree were enough to open up a conversation with a worried family on the ward. On another, a conversation about coping strategies found its way to competitive ironing, which I can confirm is a genuine sport with a governing body and an international circuit.
One of the most rewarding moments of the year came when an email arrived saying that a patient with no recourse to public funds had been granted urgent interim accommodation under the Care Act, on an application I had put together and sent off the day before. Word came back that he was on his way to collect the keys and had asked the team to pass on his thanks. Knowing that something you wrote changed where someone slept that night is not something you take for granted.
However much we contributed as students, we were only there one day a week. None of it would have been possible without a team that shows up every single day. My colleagues in the Homeless Team deserve more recognition than a paragraph at the end of a blog post, but it would feel wrong not to try. It has been a privilege to work alongside them, and I will miss my Wednesdays in the hospital.
For any law student interested in housing or public law, or in what the law feels like from the other side of the desk, the Health and Housing Project is an experience I would recommend without hesitation. Your friends will, eventually, stop worrying every time you say you are going to hospital.