New NICE guidelines on adult advocacy services published
The new guidelines set out expectations for advocacy services for adults with health and social care needs.
VoiceAbility welcomes these new guidelines from NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
The guidelines describe how to commission and deliver effective advocacy, as well as identifying who should be offered advocacy. It also discusses how to monitor and improve advocacy services, and identifies appropriate training and skills, including culturally-appropriate advocacy.
VoiceAbility CEO Jonathan Senker was one of the individual experts invited to share evidence and recommendations during the development of the new guidance.
Good advocacy can help people transform their lives, and ensure that people are truly heard and their rights are respected. The implementation of NICE’s evidence-based guidance would make a major contribution to this.
“Given NICE’s responsibility to develop guidance based on the best available evidence, their recommendation that advocacy should be available more widely than just to people who are legally entitled to it is especially significant, as is their backing to make advocacy more easily available to people detained in mental health hospitals through an ‘opt out system.’“