INDEX
What is Independent Advocacy?3
Background to PCAS and what we do4
Mission Statement and Aims4
Benefits of Advocacy5
Message from the Chair6
Message from the Manager7-9
Evaluation Administrator10
Thanks from a Professional10
Evaluation Statistics11-15
Our Advocates16-18
Case Studies18-23
CHUMS Befriending Service24-25
CHUMS Paid Befriender26
Corporate Governance27
Trustees and Principal Officers29
Financial Review30
Contact details31
Independent Examiner’s Report32
Financial Statements33-41
Statement of Disclosure42
Thanks to our Funders and Donors43
WHAT IS INDEPENDENT ADVOCACY?
At some point in our lives, most of us will need an Advocate. You may need help to make a difficult phone call, need someone who can write a letter, or someone to attend with you at a difficult meeting.
In many cases, the Advocate is a friend or family member, for others, it may be a nurse or social worker. But what if you don’t have any of these people to help? Or the problem relates in some way to your family, G.P, or social worker? This is where independent Advocacy can help, as an Advocate will support you to speak up for yourself as they are ONLY there for you and have no ties to other agencies or people in your life. An Advocate helps you to get the information you need to make real choices about your circumstances, supporting you to put your choices to others.
PCAS assists with:
Safeguarding people who are vulnerable and discredited against or whom services find difficult to serve.
Empowering people who need a stronger voice by enabling them to express their own needs and make their own decisions.
Enabling people to gain access to information, explore and understand their options, and to make their views and wishes known.
Care issues, accommodation, financial management and paperwork
Supporting at meetings and long term support in order to stay living in their own homes for longer.
PCAS can speak on behalf of people who are unable to do so for themselves.
It is important to recognise that an effective Advocate will use their knowledge, experience and skills to enable their client to have the best life possible. This might mean the Advocate telling the client about options that the client has never thought of by themselves.
It is also an Advocates job to be realistic with their client, as not all things a client may want will be possible.
BACKGROUND TO PCAS AND WHAT WE DO
PCAS Advocacy Service was started in 1995 by Shropshire Disability Consortium to provide a community based independent Advocacy Service for people with ANY disability in Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin over the age of 18.
PCAS was set up by disabled people who recognised a need for individuals to be supported to ensure their voice was heard. PCAS is committed to ensuring individuals are as involved as they can be in decisions that affect their lives. We aim to raise awareness of a person’s rights and ensure they are safeguarded in instances where people are unable to do so for themselves.
PCAS is a registered charity, to maintain its independence it is managed by a Board of Trustees, comprising of individuals who have an interest in and a commitment to the work PCAS does. The Board hold a strategic role, having responsibility to oversee effective governance by ensuing PCAS meets it legal and charitable obligations.
Our Mission Statement Is:-
PCAS provides Independent Advocacy for adults with any disability, physical, sensory, learning or mental health. We aim to be the Service of Choice, to secure clients’ rights, services, and to ensure they are listened to, empowered and treated with respect. We further aim to promote social inclusion, equality and social justice for all, irrespective of sexual orientation or ethnicity.
We Aim To:
“To relieve disabled persons primarily, but not exclusively, living or working within the Counties of Shropshire and Powys. Through the provision of information, Advocacy, Peer Counselling and Befriending.
Be recognised as the “Go To” service for Advocacy support
Enable disabled people to make informed choices
Promote independence and choice of disabled people through the provision of information
Provide a service enabling the opportunity for people to take control of their own lives
Challenge decisions made on behalf of people which they disagree with
To listen to and engage with a client and actively involve them in any action PCAS assists with
We also have a set of priorities that we use to plan what we want to achieve every year.
This year we have continued to develop our service to meet the growing needs of local people who are requiring more long term assistance with their finances and those with early onset of Dementia.
PCAS Website
Benefits of Advocacy
The benefits of Advocacy are far reaching.
Advocacy gives a vulnerable disabled person a voice when they feel no one is listening to them.
They have someone who is independent from all the statutory services and is not controlled by governmental pressures to save money.
Someone who will listen to the client, find out what the problems are, work with the client to sort out the problems.
Building a good rapport with the client, builds their self-esteem and confidence alleviates depression and anxiety improving their Mental Health and wellbeing.
Advocacy gives a person a better quality of life, through simple little things for instance reading their post and explaining the contents to someone who is dyslexic means the world to them.
When someone is being abused they are in a really bad place, very often they do not realise they are being abused until someone points out that it is wrong for someone to take your money and leave you without enough to pay your bills or buy food. Once the client has gone through the safeguarding process and realises they can have a good quality of life with the money they have coming in we see a totally different person, one who is now enjoying life because they can get out and go for a coffee or go shopping themselves, they now have a good quality of life, and with the safety net of having an advocate who they have built up a good working relationship with they know where to go if they need help in the future.
Very often the clients we help, have no one else, who is appropriate to help them, meaning the advocate is someone they can talk to about their worries and fears or problems they are having. This is far reaching because our advocate can discuss these worries, fears and problems and if we cannot help we always find someone who can, this circle of support helps the client move forward with their life
MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR
Clare Harris, Chair of the Trustees
Every year I am always delighted to be able to report on an organisation that has ambitious goals and continually challenges itself to achieve as much as it can.
We are lucky to have a fantastic team of Trustees, bringing with them a wealth of their individual knowledge and they are and have been a great support to the charity over the years.
It has been a year of change, improvement and reflection within our service as we have been busy preparing for the ‘Quality Performance Mark’ accreditation.
PCAS has always exceeded its expectations, going that extra mile to assist as many clients as we possibly can. The service is confidently led by Simon (PCAS Manager) and Alli (Evaluation Admin) with the passionate spirit they both possess; we only hope we can all keep up with you both to take PCAS into the next year and beyond to get bigger and stronger - thank you both very much.
In this great time of change, as always, funding has its challenges. PCAS is helping more and more people each year as we are unique in that we help any person over the age of 18 with any disability.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank not only our Trustees but also would like to extend my thanks to all the staff and manager, who have embraced the various changes and displayed a high level of commitment, dedication and hard work throughout the year.
MESSAGE FROM THE MANAGER
Welcome to our annual report for 2015/16, I hope you will find it an interesting read. I am sure you will be impressed by the amount of activity that our service has delivered over the past year.
Simon Arthur,
PCAS Manager
For 21 years now, PCAS has worked in Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin helping some of the most vulnerable people. I have been at the helm of PCAS since 2004 although I still visit clients myself as well as allocating referrals, securing funding, providing reports to trustees and funders and the general day to day activities involved with managing a very successful small charity. I have the full support from the board of trustees, and I must say a big thank you to all of them for their valuable input into making PCAS the success it is.
Service demand continues to challenge us and we know the effect that limited public resources will have on how our services are commissioned. We strive at all times to maintain a proactive approach to ensure that Advocacy and its benefits are prioritised wherever and whenever we can.
I am impressed with all our staff that work tirelessly and extremely hard on behalf of their clients and with ever increasing caseloads of complexity. This year we have started to have monthly staff team meetings in order to support each other and keep a finger on what is happening with difficult cases. This enables us to reflect and share our learning and offer support to workers when they need to offload about their cases. Glenda Crawshaw has also been promoted to assistant manager due to her diligence and experience and is able to take the helm in my absence, and help with signing up of new clients, this has been a huge help.
During the last 21 years PCAS has helped /supported well over 5000 people with over 3000 of these having identified multiple complex disabilities and needs. This year alone we have helped 246 disabled people, 70 more than last year. With an astonishing 3498 issues they need help with, this equates to an average of 14 issues per client, truly amazing and showing the very real need for disabled people to have access to a service like ours that can open the doors and give them access to other help they need. The biggest concentration of clients coming into PCAS has been in the Oswestry & North Shropshire area, closely followed by Shrewsbury and the surrounding areas, we have also seen an increase in Telford & Wrekin something we are keeping a keen eye on because at present we only have one 18.5 hour a week Advocate covering Telford. We continue to cover all age ranges from 18 upwards and indeed we have a good spread of ages right up to 95. During this year we have helped our clients gain access to 641 other services they need including: Other voluntary services like Citizen Advice, A4U, Specialist IMCA Advocacy services, Banks, GP’s Housing Services, Social Care services, Solicitors & Utility companies.
Evaluating
One of the hardest things to do is monitoring and recording of soft outcomes for our clients and funders. We are very fortunate in having our own unique database to encapsulate all clients’ information and a unique excel document to record questionnaire results and data for monitoring purposes. From these we can print off queries, such as ages/post codes areas/ issues etc. and produce graphs of percentages of changes and the impact our service has on clients automatically. These provide hard evidence for growing the service and the direction our service goes in the future, and for reporting to our funders.
It is forever a frustration that clients seem unwilling to fill in feedback forms (even with help) but we recognise that a lot of our clients often want to quickly move on from a reminder of the situation that required our services. To that end, we always do a start of Advocacy questionnaire, an interim one 3 months later (or every 3 months in long term cases) and an end of Advocacy form – this is the one we struggle with due to some clients not engaging once their issue has been dealt with.
Quality Performance Mark - The work associated with gaining this quality mark is significant, we have embarked on the journey and I hope to be able to update you all in the next annual report.
Our Shropshire Advocates are starting the Level 3 Advocacy Qualification over the coming months, and again I will give an update on this in the next annual report, this is an important qualification for Advocates as it is the only recognised qualification for Advocacy services.
Funding – I am so pleased to announce that we gained further funding to continue the brilliant work being done by PCAS in the county. I would like to say a big thank you to: The Big Lottery Fund (Reaching Communities) who have supported us again, and The Henry Smith Charity for supporting the work we do in Telford & Wrekin, to Shropshire Council through CAAN (Community Advice & Advocacy Network) and to Select Healthcare for their continued support.
Partnerships – We continuewith our partnership work within CAAN, although we do not know how secure the funding is for this partnership given the further government cuts to local authorities, we will keep an eye on the situation so any cuts have the least amount of effect on our service delivery.
We have assisted our clients with over 38,000 issues over the last 21 years that affect their lives, some examples this year being: Helping disabled people fight for their rights to services they need to lead as independent a life as possible, safeguarding and adult protection has seen an increase this year with The Care Act coming into force, moving into or out of residential or nursing care homes, gaining access to solicitors who can help them with appointee-ship or guardianship or other legal matters. Supporting disabled people to set up budgeting plans, managing finances has seen a huge increase this year with people needing help to transfer benefit payments from post office accounts to Bank accounts so that they can get their bills paid by direct debit, appropriate bank accounts, building confidence through really getting to know the client and their limitations, finding solutions with them, challenging decisions that affect their health and wellbeing, helping clients with learning difficulties or dyslexia to read their post explaining the contents and aiding with any actions needed. This is just a snapshot of some of the issues our clients have presented with over the past year.
We are a unique service in the county because we visit people in their own home this has certainly helped the most vulnerable people with complex needs to access help when they are most in need. Not having to arrange accessible transport or for carers to attend to an office appointment, means our clients get assistance without these stresses and problems. This simple solution means even more to the client as the rural county in which we operate causes isolated and lonely people distress when trying to access other services. We have found over the years this way of working really helps build trust and rapport with clients as they see someone making the effort for them and not adding to their life’s burdens. It helps increase their confidence knowing someone is listening to them and acting to help them have a better quality of life. We are also a constant in that client’s life meaning they see the same Advocate for the duration of their problems and issues.
Many of the clients we help and support have reported that they have gained valuable skills during our input with them e.g.
feeling more able to ask questions themselves
through confidence building they feel that they can speak up for themselves
gain access to other services they need to help them
feeling less angry or anxious, more in control of their lives with help from an advocate standing alongside them
listened to and an increased feeling of self-worth
Sometimes just having someone to talk over their problems and issues with and how these problems are affecting them helps them focus and make better decisions in life helping their overall wellbeing.
The following extract is taken from Shropshire Council’s priorities document stating:-
“We will change how we support vulnerable adults – seeking to understand the whole person, their family, and their lives, helping them to understand and make best possible use of all available resources in the community. Only then and where absolutely necessary will the council step in to provide what support is needed to keep people as independent as possible.”
The way local authorities are going to be delivering services, or not, will have an extreme effect on our service with more being asked of us over the coming year and beyond.
We are looking into how we can cope with the increase in the amount of clients needing help through further grant funding. This will enable us to continue meeting our aims and objectives for another 21 years; enabling us to be even more successful and grow to meet the ever changing needs of disabled people in the county.
Sustainability is always going to be our biggest challenge as a charity, even more so because the very people needing our help do not have the means to pay for it. Our ethos as a charity has always been “free at point of delivery”. This will not change, meaning we must look at other ways at becoming more sustainable.