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Advocacy and Involvement in the London Borough of Newham

From the 3rd January 2012, in the London Borough of Newham, we now offer several services to support people to speak up about issues and challenges in their lives:

• Independent Mental Capacity Advocacy
• Professional Community Advocacy
• Citizen Advocacy
• Self Advocacy

You can find out more about these services below.

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Statutory Advocacy

Independent Mental Capacity Advocacy (IMCA):

We work with people who have been assessed as lacking capacity and who do not have family or friends who are appropriate to speak up for them. This work is always about decisions around serious medical treatment or changes in long term accommodation.

An IMCA can also support where there are concerns regarding Safeguarding or care reviews.

You can find out more about our IMCA services in our IMCA section.  This includes how to make a referral on our dedicated IMCA line.

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Professional Advocacy

In Newham we provide a generic advocacy service to adults living in the Newham area. The majority of people we work with:

• are deaf or hearing impaired
• are blind or have visual impairments
• are deaf blind
• have physical impairments or disabilities
• have long term conditions
• have learning disabilities
• are older People
• are Informal carers

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Citizen Advocacy Service

Our volunteer Citizen Advocates work with anyone from the list above living in or funded by the London Borough of Newham.

What is a Citizen Advocate?

A Citizen Advocate is someone who volunteers their time to get to know a person with a disability. They are someone who will be on the side of that person when they want to say something.

You can learn more about what Citizen Advocacy is and how important this role is on our Citizen Advocacy page.

If you would like to be a citizen advocate, please contact newham@voiceability.org for more details on how to get involved.

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Self Advocacy

We provide independent support to people to run self advocacy groups.

The groups enable people to provide mutual support, raise common issues and ensure that these are addressed. We also support people with learning disabilities to work collectively to input into the planning and development of services.

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Contact Us

If you have any questions about the services we run, want to get involved or would like to speak to an advocate, you can get in contact using the details below or by using our text phone service.

If you are a text phone user, simply dial 18001 followed by our normal phone number (020 33 55 7142) and a translator will act as an interface between you and a VoiceAbility team member.

This works the other way as well, so if we need to get in touch with you, we can call a text phone by dialing 18001 followed by your number. We can speak to an operator who converts it to text.

You can find our more information about text phones by downloading this useful text phone instruction leaflet.