Advocacy Services

Currently, we hold 5 contracts for delivering Advocacy Services:

• Advocacy in Leicester City for adults with a physical impairment. This is one to one advocacy.
• Advocacy in Leicestershire for adults with physical impairments and adults with learning disabilities. This is one to one advocacy.
• Advocacy in Rutland for adults with learning disabilities. A significant amount of this work is about supporting Sub-Groups of the Partnership Board as well as supporting people to attend the Partnership Board. We also do one to one advocacy and, in discussion with the contract department, can work with other disabled people.
• We offer a non-instructed Advocacy Service to disabled children who mainly use residential care for respite; this is a contract funded by the Children’s Rights Service. In the near future we hope to be in contact with families of these children to see if there is advocacy support we can offer.
• We are carrying out an Advocacy Service, and have been doing so since it opened in June 2010, in Warwick Lodge (Melton area) which is part of the Castlebeck Group. This is for people with a brain injury and is a rehabilitation unit. We visit on a monthly basis to talk to residents individually about issues that affect them

Until June 2011, we jointly held an Advocacy Information Service, with Just Services, to provide advocacy to the residents of 29 homes and 17 day centres for older people, some of whom have dementia. Birmingham City Council took a bold decision, which they stuck to, of closing all these units and funding the Advocacy Information Service to help people chose alternative places to live. Residents of 25 homes are now happily settled in alternative accommodation. The last 4 homes are due to close in November 2011 when we hope to be invited back to finish the job.

Advocacy is one of those terms that is frequently used in the field of social care but often there is not a shared understanding. To help with this mosaic has produced a paper called ‘Understanding Advocacy’; this paper is available from Debbie Farrar at mosaic. In the near future the whole document will be available on mosaic’s Advocacy Information website to which there will be a link.

It is important to think of advocacy as a ‘process’ with a number of different methods that can be used in that process. The definition of advocacy (agreed by the Network of Advocacy Projects in Leicester and Leicestershire) is:

‘Advocacy promotes social inclusion, equality and justice by empowering people. It enables people to express their personal views and needs, thereby achieving their rights and entitlements. It also assists people in securing relevant information and knowledge, enabling them to make informed choices’

Action for Advocacy (A4A), a national organisation, has brought out an Advocacy Charter which underpins the principles of advocacy. The Charter is on the A4A website and will be on our Advocacy Information website very soon.

There are a number of methods by which advocacy can be delivered:

• Independent or one to one Advocacy (which mosaic uses most often)
• Non-instructed Advocacy (another method frequently used by mosaic)
• Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards or DoLS (mosaic, Just Services, Age Concern, Alzheimer’s Society and POhWER do most of this work in Leicester and Leicestershire)
• Watching Brief (another method used by mosaic, especially in the residential service)
• Group Advocacy (used in Rutland and by Mencap in the City))
• Legal Advocacy
• Independent Mental Capacity Advocacy (POhWER holds this contract for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland)
• Independent Mental Health Advocacy (contract held by LAMP)
• Self Advocacy Groups (Self Advocacy in Action does a lot of this work in Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland)
• Peer Advocacy (used a lot by LAMP)
• Volunteer Advocacy (used in Age Concern)
• Citizen Advocacy

This is not an exclusive list of organisations that use these forms of advocacy.

While all our Advocacy Services are funded by local authorities or private companies we know that all advocacy contracts are being reviewed within the next 18 months, possibly going out to tender. It will be interesting to see how this all develops.

Updated on 5 September, 2011