Hampshire Advocacy Services

Hampshire County Council and our NHS partners (the HIOW and Frimley ICBs) are currently reviewing existing Advocacy services as part of the re-procurement cycle. We will be tendering for a service provider later this year to provide these services on an ongoing basis from the 1st April 2024.

Our service is a universal offer that covers both children and adults eligible for statutory advocacy across all care groups. It also covers elements of non-statutory advocacy such as, general mental health advocacy. The new service will mirror the current contract in its geographic scope and will be available across Hampshire.

Question:

During the discharge of our statutory advocacy duties, it is sometimes required that we purchase out of area support for individuals. At the moment our service specification requires our provider to signpost us to another suitable service from whom we can spot purchase these services. In previous contract iterations we have managed this internally, but we have an interest in hearing from the market about possible methodologies for managing out of area referrals. We would like to take a realistic and proactive approach to managing these demands on our service and we would like to hear from advocacy providers about how they could or would propose to manage these requirements.

The current figure for out-of-county placements are:

Between 26-Jun-22 and 26-Jun-23 we had 877 DolS authorisations that required a paid representative

595. Hampshire County Council area
166. Soton CC/Portsmouth CC
89. in other near neighbours (Surrey/Berks/W Sussex/Dorset/Wiltshire/IOW)
27. further afield.

We wished to leave an opportunity to accept different ideas on this matter so, we have kept our question open ended to allow scope for this however, please when responding consider the following points:

Out of area referrals are largely in bordering counties so, please think about differentiating a response for immediately neighbouring counties and referrals which are further afield.

We assign a budget to funding out of area advocacy from local providers, but this could be reassigned to fund travel expenses or resources to provide the advocacy directly within our contract.

If you have relationships with other agencies that you believe could be leveraged to provide these services, please think about how you could manage resource challenges. Current services are able to identify local services, but they are regularly over subscribed and lack the capacity to accept our referrals.

If you were to provide our advocacy services, how would you propose to manage out of area referrals for both those people that are within a neighbouring county and those people placed elsewhere in the UK?

We would be appreciative of your experience in the matter and that you send your responses to the three questions above to:

Cecilia.Agbaje@hants.gov.uk;

Alice.Madden-Curtis@hants.gov.uk;

Matthew.Hunt2@hants.gov.uk

Please may responses be returned to Cecilia, Alice and Matthew by July 14th 12noon.

Please also note that the timescales for tendering the opportunity mentioned in this advert are indicative and the information associated to the tender will be published in the publicly available tender documents at the time of its launch.

Kind regards,

Cecilia Agbaje

Learning Disability / Mental Health Commissioning Manager