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Richmond Advocacy Services

VoiceAbility Richmond offers the following services to people living in the Richmond area:

• Professional Advocacy for People with Learning Disabilities
• Citizen Advocacy
• Quality Checkers
• Support Brokerage

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Professional Advocacy for People with Learning Disabilities

VoiceAbility provides issue based Professional Advocacy for people with learning disabilities aged 16 and over who live in the London Borough of Richmond Upon Thames. 

This means that if you, or someone you know, has something that they want to discuss with an advocate, we will work specifically on that issue.  When an issue has been resolved or feel that they do not want the support from an advocate anymore we will finish working with the person.

Citizen Advocacy

We also recruit, train and support Citizen (volunteer) Advocates in their role of advocating for a person with a learning disability. Generally a Citizen Advocate relationship is a longer term involvement and is not specifically issue based.

Referrals to the service can be made in person, via email or telephone. To find out more please contact Claire Camplin, Senior Advocate at our Richmond Office.

Quality Checkers 

Our Quality Checker service is run by people with learning disabilities, for people with learning disabilities. We work with residents to check the quality of support provided to people living in residential care.

We then write reports for the people that we have visited which can be shared with friends and relatives, the people who run the homes and the local council. The reports contain details of what the Quality Checkers feel is going well and also make recommendations on how services can improve on the support they are providing. These checks help people to be aware of their rights and to speak up for themselves.

The team have made a video to show what checks their group makes, why the service is so vital and what training they receive to make sure they can be the best quality checkers possible. 

Quality Checkers - Richmond from VoiceAbility on Vimeo.

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Richmond Independent Brokerage Service (RIBS)

VoiceAbility are part of the Richmond Independent Brokerage Service or RIBS.  This is a consortium of voluntary groups that was set up to develop and provide advice, information and a Support Brokerage Service.  We work with individuals with social care needs and carers accessing Self Directed Support in the London Borough of Richmond.

Our RIBS Support Brokers work with all service users across the social service spectrum. We support service users to create their own support plans in a personalised way. The service users support plan will explain lots about themselves:

• who they are
• what is important to them
• what they are happy or unhappy with
• what they would like to stay the same
• what they would like to change

Support plans are essential, they make clear

• the type of support they need
• how they are going to get and manage this support
• what their budget is, showing how they are going to spend their personal budget.

Once the plan has been approved by social services the support broker will work with the service user to put into place the changes they wanted in their support plan and help them do things like employ staff, join activities and start classes.

To find out more about RIBS or to make a referral please contact the RIBS helpline on 020 8831 6083 or via info@ruils.co.uk or speak to the Richmond office on the details below: