Voices of the Voiceless!
People First work with those who can’t use words
For six months now we have been running our Voices of the Voiceless project. The aim of the project is to support people who don’t verbally communicate to have better lives. The project works by sending an experienced specialist advocate into residential care homes for several weeks. The advocate works with teams of support staff and managers to introduce a programme of changes and improvements.
Working in partnership has long been the goal of People First. We are now able to do so, by offering support to care providing organisations, through helping them to further develop and improve their residential services for people who have often been given multiple labels such as;
‘Non-Verbal’ ‘Complex Needs’ ‘Challenging Behaviour’ ‘Profound and multiple needs’.
However, at People First we don’t agree with giving people labels… we are all the same! We all just need different types of support.
We decided that it was about time we really tried to work together to ensure people in residential care have meaningful quality in their lives, through having more to do, more say in their own homes, and much more inclusion.
As part of the project, we pulled together a stakeholder group of providers, social workers, community nurses and psychologists. We also invited a wonderful self advocate – Rachel Monk.
To read Rachel’s story click here
The stakeholder group directs and advises the project, and also aims to provide support to individual staff members working on the project.