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Services

Bilingual Health Advocacy

“Advocacy is taking action to help people say what they want, secure their rights, represent their interests and obtain services they need. Advocates and advocacy schemes work in partnership with the people they support and take their side. Advocacy promotes social inclusion, equality and social justice"
(Advocacy Charter 2005)

WHFS has a team of 15 Health Advocates, speaking Bengali, Somali, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Turkish and Portuguese and working to enable clients to access local primary healthcare more effectively. Health Advocates promote the health of clients and empower them to achieve better health outcomes for them selves and their families. Health Advocates negotiate between clients and health professionals to ensure that clients understand issues and decisions that affect their healthcare – this can often involve translating not only between languages but also between cultural understandings.

Health Advocates:

• Bring together different healthcare approaches to assist client’s understanding
  
  WHFS advocates regularly report difficulties that clients experience when attempting to reconcile traditional or community-based approaches to healthcare with those prescribed through conventional medical health services.
• Have an understanding of cultural differences and modes of learning
  
  WHFS Advocates have a better understanding of what are meaningful healthcare learning experiences for their clients. They also report the high value their clients place on community approaches to healthcare and those patients often prefer to confide in their advocate whose skill is then to bring about discussion with their GPs sensitively touching on the issues concerning the client.
• Provide support, information and additional services
  
  It is acknowledged that advocates who give support and information to clients before and after their appointments and offer ongoing telephone and face to face advice is more valuable and cost effective to the NHS that purely interpreting intervention.