Developing effective mental health advocacy

The challenge

To develop and deliver services that aim to establish how effective mental health advocacy may be in different circumstances.

The King's Fund has been involved in funding advocacy and mental health projects for a number of years. In bringing together the two areas, we are interested in addressing the challenge above.

By funding your service and helping you to evaluate its impact, we hope to identify the difference that advocacy can make to mental health service users and to clarify for other health professionals the difference that advocates can make to the people they work with.

The definition of advocacy we would like to use is as follows:

Advocacy is taking action to help people say what they want, secure their rights, represent their interests and obtain services they need.

We are interested in supporting organisations that offer one-to-one or representational advocacy in which an advocate (not necessarily paid) supports an individual to obtain the information that s/he needs, explore options and have her/his views heard.

We will only fund projects that meet all of the following criteria. You must be:
  • working with people who use statutory mental health services or have expressed a wish to use these services but have found it difficult to do so
  • using trained advocates
  • working with people in the community, within their own homes or in hospitals (we are not interested in work with people in acute wards who have been sectioned).
We are particularly interested in supporting projects with people who have found it difficult to access mental health advocacy services in the past, such as older people or refugees.

We also want to work with partner organisations to explore the ways in which the relationship between advocates and health professionals can be developed to improve health outcomes for people with mental health needs.

We would expect the advocacy service to be independent of any service provider. We will not fund projects that provide a range of services of which advocacy is only one.

Work we have supported