Generic one to one advocacy
POhWER provides generic one to one advocacy services available to adults in Hertfordshire and East Sussex.
Advocacy is about helping you to speak up for yourself or having someone to speak on your behalf if you need it. Our advocacy service is open to anyone, and is sensitive to any particular cultural, language or other communication needs you have.
What Advocates can do for their clients
A one to one Advocate will work solely with a client and at the client's direction.
In this role the Advocate can perform the following:
- Attend meetings with the client.
- Carry out correspondence and telephone calls with the client and third parties.
- Support a client to access formal procedures such as statutory complaints systems.
- Contact any professional body.
How advocacy works: the client encounter
All one to one client work follows the advocacy issue circle.
The advocacy issue circle is a process that follows four stages. Each stage defines a moment in the overall process of providing advocacy, and requires different tasks.
Stage 1: The client
- The circle begins and ends with the client, and the encounters that take place between the Advocate and the client.
- It is the client who at the initial stage gives consent for the work to take place.
Stage 2: The Issue
- The Advocate talks through the client's concerns and through listening and facilitation, helps the client to identify an overall issue, or set of parallel issues.
- The Advocate offers options in terms of what the client is entitled to do.
- The Advocate will establish how the client would like the Advocate to work alongside them.
Stage 3: Action
- The actions identified in stage two are being followed through.
- The Advocate updates the client and checks to see if actions are being delivered to time, or responses from third parties are taking place.
Stage 4: Review
- This stage is reached once an action or set of actions have been completed and the Advocate needs to gain further instruction from the client about where the issue now stands.
- At this stage one of two things happens, either the client and Advocate agree to close the issue, as it has been completed, or the circle is followed through again.
Case Studies
To see how the Advocacy Issue Circle works in practice, have a look at our Case Studies
Parallel Issues
In the case of parallel issues, one issue may close quite easily, while another may require exhausting a list of available options.
The lifetime of the issue is entirely relative to the issue's complexity and the client's approach in instructing the Advocate. Ideally the Advocate should be empowering the client to self advocate and have the tools and confidence to work without the support of the Advocate.
Often this is not the case, and the client may want extensive advocacy input.
This creates a wide spectrum of casework, which extends from the swift resolution work that can be carried out in 30 minutes, to ongoing work that can take months or years to bring to an end.
Find out more about the service we provide in Hertfordshire.
