Advocacy advice and support

Ensuring service users are empowered and able to provide informed comment is one of the biggest challenges facing commissioners, regulators, and providers. Services to vulnerable people are highly regulated, and yet in general the 'customer' is not sufficiently enabled to comment on, be involved in, or influence the support they receive

We have experience of all forms of advocacy including self advocacy, systems advocacy, and individual representation. We can provide a range of responses to shortfalls in this complex area including:-

Audits of current arrangements within a service resulting in a full report with recommendations for improvement.

Reviews of individual arrangements in order to ascertain their effectiveness and appropriateness.

Advice on involving service users within decision making processes.

Users and potential users of the regulated services must the ultimate arbiters of what is right. Not via some lip service to consultation, some tokenistic engagement, but through a real shift of power, to counterbalance the relative powerlessness of the individual user.

Bryan Heiser – Board member NCSC. Community Care article June 2003.

Consulting stakeholders Underlying any adequate approach to self-assessment is the need to ascertain, and act on, the views of stakeholders. Inspectors will look for clear evidence, therefore, that schools have collected and acted upon the views of parents and pupils and have a sense of their contribution to the community and liaise appropriately with external bodies.

New inspections and the viewpoint of users - Ofsted report - 18 October 2004