Dear colleagues,

Over the past year, Advocacy Focus have been delivering a bespoke service to autistic inpatients across Lancashire and South Cumbria. Our aims have been to gather autistic people’s views around their admission to hospital, discuss the environment and other factors of their stay, along with their experience of advocacy. Collating their experiences has enabled us to feedback their views to the trust, and share constructive feedback of their experiences, but also the experiences of autistic people being admitted to hospital in the future. The conference will be very beneficial to Advocacy providers and other health and social care professionals, and we hope you can attend to learn from our experiences but also feed in your own expertise of working in inpatient settings.

Our conference aims to:

- Share what we have learnt from autistic people across Lancashire and South Cumbria about their hospital admissions and advocacy

- Empower autistic people to share their experiences and their thoughts, whether positive or critical

- Provide a space for services to reflect on their own practices and whether they are meeting the needs of autistic people

We will hear from keynote speakers such as Kirsty Stuart (Irwin Mitchell solicitors), Gail Petty (NDTi) and Kate Mercer (Blackbelt Advocacy). Our speakers will share information about supporting autistic people in inpatient settings from a legal perspective, and findings from the national review of inpatient advocacy for people with a learning disability and autistic people in mental health, learning disability or autism specialist hospitals.

To book on the conference please follow the link: https://www.trybooking.co.uk/BZLL

We look forward to seeing you there!