Your Life, Your Choice - Consultation on independent advocacy for vulnerable adults in North Lincolnshire.
In 2009 the council and NHS North Lincolnshire produced a plan setting out how it will improve health and social care inequalities in North Lincolnshire. One of the key promises was to give you, the resident, a greater say in shaping services to ensure they meet local needs.
In October 2009 the council consulted with lots of people to develop a blueprint for independent advocacy in North Lincolnshire.
The purpose of this consultation was to find out what people want from independent advocacy, and how and where people want to access independent advocacy .
An advocate is someone who supports a person so that their views are heard and their rights are upheld. They can help a person to put their views and feelings across when decisions are being made about their life. They can give support which will enable a person to make choices and they inform people of their rights.
An advocate will support a person to speak up for themselves or, in some situations, will speak on a person’s behalf. An advocate will never tell someone what to do or judge them. Independent advocates have to be 100 per cent on the side of the person they are advocating for.
Advocacy in North Lincolnshire:
Statutory services such as the council and the NHS have a legal duty to provide specific types of advocacy, and there are a number of voluntary organisations in North Lincolnshire that support vulnerable adults to have their voices heard and wishes respected. Self-advocacy groups are groups of people who share a common experience (for example deaf people) who decide to join together to advocate for each other and for people in the same situation.
What did we want to find out?
The views of everyone that contributed to the consultation were put into a report. The full version of this report can be downloaded in the following documents. We have supplied an original and an easy read version of the report.
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Original report
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Easy read version
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This report helped to develop an outcome based service specification document to say what providers will do for advocacy services that sets out:
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What is wanted from independent advocacy?
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What independent advocacy should achieve for vulnerable adults
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What independent advocacy should look like
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How and where independent advocacy can be accessed.
The following points were key outcomes from the consultation:
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The need for advocacy is likely to grow as people need help having their voice heard in going through the Self-Directed support process. The population of vulnerable people is also growing
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North Lincolnshire Council and NHS North Lincolnshire fund many other organisations that have advocacy as part of their role.
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Most vulnerable people don’t know about advocacy this is the biggest barrier to receiving the service, knowledge amongst staff is patchy.
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Vulnerable people want advocacy from an organisation they are already comfortable with their ‘advocate of choice’.
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Advocacy are being used to help people navigate through the Health and Social Care ‘maze’
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There are gaps in current service such as with form filling and befriending or ‘softer advocacy’
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There is a need to develop citizen and peer advocacy, thus reducing the need for crisis advocacy.
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List of how to improve referrals; triggers such as identification of when is an advocate may be needed, such as when citizens are about to undergo hospital treatment.
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Independence of service, how can the service be fully independent if advocacy is paid for by North Lincolnshire Council and NHS North Lincolnshire, perhaps we could involve independent party in monitoring.
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All organisations that provide advocacy should meet regularly to help signpost and share good practice.
What have we done:
In July 2010 the council put out to tender an advocacy service that was designed to take into account all the points raised by the consultation. The council is now pleased to announce that Cloverleaf have won the contract with Adult Services to deliver the Advocacy Service.
The Generic and Independent Mental Capacity Advocacy (IMCA) Service are free to all eligible adults. Cloverleaf can be contacted as follows:
Phone: 01724 854952
Email: northlincs@cloverleaf-advocacy.co.uk
Address:
North Lincolnshire Office
Central Community Centre
Lindum Street
Scunthorpe
DN15 6QU
There are also other organisations within North Lincolnshire that provide an advocacy type service.
Please note: The above documents are in Portable Document Format (PDF). You will need a suitable reader to view them. A reader can be downloaded free from the Adobe website (full instructions for downloading the reader are provided on the site).