Michelle Cox-Coley, Operations Director for Iris Care Group’s services in England, has worked in care her entire life and has seen first-hand how important advocacy is for empowering people to have their voices heard.
Advocacy is a powerful way to drive positive change in social care. Supporting people to share their thoughts and have their voices heard helps us improve and reshape our services based on the lived experiences of the people who use them.
At Iris Care Group we work collaboratively with external advocacy teams to ensure that the people in our services have access to independent support when making decisions about their lives and care. This collaborative approach has been incredibly effective for encouraging the people we support to communicate their thoughts and feelings, and to take active roles in decisions made about their lives.
For people with communication difficulties, we also work closely with advocacy teams and their loved ones to develop bespoke, person-centred support plans that consider their best interests and the things that are important and meaningful to them.
Supporting people to advocate for themselves
A crucial part of advocacy is ensuring that people are provided with the right knowledge and support to make informed decisions for themselves, and that we are ensuring those decisions are within their best interests.
When we supported a woman with a learning disability who was transitioning into our Supported Living services, she had communicated to the team that she would like support maintaining a prior friendship that she had developed. She also expressed that she was developing feelings for this person and would like support to eventually pursue a relationship with them.
As she had capacity to make this decision, our goal was to help her develop her understanding of intimacy, consent, and keeping safe to better inform her decisions, working closely with her Social Worker and an advocacy service to achieve this.
Supporting her to advocate for herself and her wishes was a really important step towards greater independence, and we regularly met with her to talk through how it was going and discuss any concerns or worries she might have. This was key to her support and enabled her to use what she had learned to inform her decisions.
Advocacy to drive change
We have recently established the Whispers forum, which is a self-advocacy initiative that supports us to make improvements to our services in collaboration with the people we support.
Led by the people we support, representatives meet on a monthly basis to share their feedback and ideas about how we can improve. The forum is already proving to be amazingly effective, and works closely with our Quality Team to ensure that we are improving with the perspectives and needs of the people we support at the forefront.
The members of the forum are planning to visit others who receive support to gather feedback about their support and suggest improvements based on their first-hand experience.
The group have produced their own ‘Quality Checker’ which is list of questions and measures to help them make an informed view on quality of support. These questions are designed to help people communicate their thoughts and feelings about their home and environment and advocate for their opinions and wishes, including important questions such as ‘Is there space to move around?’, ‘Are people involved in activities?’ and ‘Do staff take time to know what people are interested in?’.
It has been amazing to see the people we support advocate for themselves through this channel, and to see the insightful perspectives and creative ideas that have emerged from the group. After this fantastic start, we will be continuing to grow the forum throughout 2024 and increase their involvement in our decisions at an organisational level.
iriscaregroup
iriscaregroup.co.uk
