Advocacy

Describes the Abhay Partnership Project to deliver advocacy services for South Asian elders and their informal elder carers in west London. It also aims to change and improve how the 6 consortium partners, 3 host agencies and 9 community centres design and deliver services to such people.

The project was set up to improve the support offered to carers of people with serious mental health problems through supportive and educational group workshops. It aimed to empower carers by improving their understanding of mental health services and care; and to develop a model of carer and mentoring support. From the 15 carers recruited, five left due to personal circumstances leaving a core group of 10. The group also contained a high proportion of black and minority ethnic carers.

Over the last decade significant developments and debates have highlighted the disadvantages experienced by people who use mental health services.

Social Role Valorisation theory, advanced to enhance the lives of disadvantaged groups of people, has addressed community care and lay advocacy for patients and users but has ignored the roles of relatives and carers. [In this article, the term ‘patient’ is used to describe a person who is detained under the Mental Health Act, liable to be detained, or in hospital on an informal basis.

Daughter caregivers of elders with dementia become their parents' advocates over time. This role takes on even greater importance when one or both parents are placed in a long-term care facility. This article presents the results of a qualitative study aimed at explaining how this advocacy role evolves following institutionalisation. In-depth interviews were conducted with daughters (N = 14) of an institutionalised parent with dementia and selected using a theoretical sampling procedure.

This article explores the potential impact of the mental health and mental incapacity law reforms on carers. The reform proposals anticipate a number of overlapping and at times conflicting roles for carers (including those of gatekeeper, decision-making proxy and advocate), which is suggestive of an ongoing ambivalence toward the caring role at the level of ethics, policy and strategic planning.

The author looks at three areas of the Care and Support Bill: the rights of carers, rights to funded advocacy and eligibility. Under the Bill carers will have rights to funding for services for the first time and there will be funding for independent advocates for those who will struggle to navigate the social care system alone. However, as the author explains, eligibility criteria may mean that people with moderate needs will fall outside the system.

The increased presence and participation in Australian society of people with an intellectual disability provides challenges for the provision of primary health care. General practitioners (GPs) identify themselves as ill equipped to provide for this heterogeneous population. A major obstacle to the provision of appropriate health care is seen as inadequate communication between the GP and the person with an intellectual disability, who may or may not be accompanied by a carer or advocate.

Background  The aim of this paper is to investigate the role parents are playing in direct payments provision for their son or daughter with intellectual disabilities.

This resource is aimed at both care providers and carers focusing on the key messages from the dementia quality standard and explaining how each quality statement relates to each audience. It provides links to key resources, further information, and practical tools which are relative to carers and care providers as appropriate. Drawing on existing guidance, NICE quality standards describe the high priority areas for quality improvement using a set of specific, concise and measurable statements.