National Care Service - independent advocacy: co-design insights and next steps

Introduction

Since 2023, we have been working with people from diverse backgrounds and communities across Scotland. This has been part of work to help us make sure that we are co-designing the National Care Service in a way that will help everyone in Scotland.

The findings from this co-design work are being used to inform decisions about the design of the National Care Service programme.

This report covers the key findings from 47 co-design engagements where we discussed independent advocacy.

The overall goal of this work was to:

• hear people’s experiences of getting or receiving independent advocacy
• find out what makes it difficult to access independent advocacy
• learn what issues people want independent advocacy to help with
• learn how people want independent advocacy to be delivered
• help make independent advocacy provision fairer and more accessible

To help us understand people’s experiences, we sorted those key findings by which stage of accessing independent advocacy they refer to.

Before accessing independent advocacy

People told us that, in the current social care support system, access to independent advocacy is not equal for everyone.

Trying to access independent advocacy

People told us that information about independent advocacy and how to get support should be more accessible.

Getting independent advocacy

To improve independent advocacy, people suggested that:

• more types of independent advocacy should be made available to support people
• people want their independent advocacy support to be longer term and available to support them whenever they need it
• more independent advocacy should use a relationship-based model focussed on mutual trust between an advocate and the people they support