We are still in the first month of our project’s development and its wider potential is already clear. Compassion in Dying has recently been inundated with enquiries about Advance Decisions as a result of a letter published in a national older people’s magazine.
Getting out and about to other projects has been a really useful this month. Meetings with East London Dementia Care and Hackney and City’s Alzheimer’s Society enabled us to identify some of the barriers to ensuring individuals with dementia are aware of their end of life rights and ensuring staff feel able to support them.
Our End of Life Advocacy Project is now officially launched! Our volunteers have been an amazing help with our mail out to GP practices, charities and care homes in East London.
Now that the project has launched we are working hard to involve as many of our existing Volunteers within the Befriending and Advocacy services to be part of this project.
We recently completed some training around end of life rights to our volunteer Befrienders and Advocates in East London.
Last week we had an interesting and productive meeting with Kath Parson, Chief Executive of the Older People’s Advocacy Alliance (OPAAL).
We had an excellent meeting this week with our Age UK East London partners about the project.
Over the past 10 days I have not stopped thinking about end-of-life rights and choices. This has mostly been because I’ve been preparing our expression of interest for flagship funding through the Big Lottery Silver Dreams Fund – Flagship Grants.
So far on this blog we have shared thoughts on the training, feedback from community stakeholders and project news. Today we are delighted to be able to share with you what one of the project beneficiaries has to say about it.
It’s been a busy but exciting few weeks for us preparing for the My Life My Decision roll-out. As well as progressing the grant paperwork, Becky and Danielle are currently on a ‘My Life My Decision Tour’ visiting our six new delivery partners across England.
