The trouble with advocacy......

The trouble with advocacy starts with the first three letters a, d and v.............

Advocacy organisations can be very focused on delivering the best advocacy they can, which is obviously a good thing. However, advocacy providers sometimes forget what the client actually wants when they approach tehm for help. They don’t always say ‘I want advocacy’ and even if when they do what they actually need is often something quite different.

My work recently with clients has shown me that what clients want is help and more specifically help that achieves a very precise outcome. My clients do not in fact care whether the form the help takes is information, advice, signposting, support, talking them through what they have decided to do, advocacy or a piece of work through the medium of interpretative dance so long as it helps them achieve the outcome they need. However, advocacy often find itself trying to fit the client to advocacy. That can’t be right.

I hate to say it but commissioners may have it right in the way that many are shaping up their information, advice advocacy offers to meet their obligations under the Care Act. They are reacting to the need to provide that support by seeking to integrate their local information, advice and advocacy provision and to do so across the great health and social care divide. However, many advocacy organisations and advocates are still behaving like the only thing advice and advocacy have in common are their first three letters, a, d and v. That cannot be right.

It seems to me that, in order to be relevant in a world of austerity where resources are shrinking while genuine need is increasing, Advocacy providers have a duty to offer a spectrum of support ranging from information or advice to advocacy so that resources can be concentrated on those that need advocacy the most. Isn’t empowering people to do what they can to take control of their situations and lives what advocacy is supposed to be about?

If the advocacy sector doesn’t get its head around the problem with the first three letters there is a real risk that providers from the advice sector or elsewhere (such as the dreaded A4E) will solve the conundrum and begin to occupy the space that was once Advocacy's. Advocacy needs to adapt or it will wither.

In the future many more clients will need to be empowered and supported to do moe for themselves. That means that advocacy will need a range of self help materials, in fact a much more extensive range of self help materials than anyone has ever considered using before. These self help materials will not only include the materials already offered around NHS complaintsbut also materials for social care issues, health issues, dirct payments, wellbeing and much more. It is only by offering more self help that Advocacy will be able to concentrate advocacy support on those that need it the most while taking some of the workload pressure off advocates in those services. That can only be good for clients and advocates.

Perhaps Advocacy providers could for once work together to pool and shape the self help materials that will be needed in the future. Hmmm..... there isn't a great history behind the sector working together. However the forced pace of change and the funding challenge facing adult social care may force commissioners to commission the outcomes they want regardless of what the sector thinks. That cannot be right but may be oncoming train that the sector thinks is the light at the end of the tunnel.

Please feel free to challenge, suggest alternatives or agree and leave a comment.....

Til next time.....

D