COMPASS
Community Peer Advocacy Support Service
“Your vision, your choice”
Advocacy
A COMPASS advocate can help you to:
Gain and understand information regarding your situation and what to expect from services
Explore options to assist making choices
Communicate your needs and wishes
Have your rights acknowledged and upheld
Access services to which you are entitled
Use the complaint procedures
Feel you are not alone and someone is on your side
Put in place an advanced directive
A COMPASS advocate can attend meetings with you to ensure your voice is heard. This includes but is not limited to:
Meetings and assessments with Doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists
Meetings with Government agencies e.g. WINZ, CYF (we recommend everyone takes a support person with them to WINZ)
Mental Health Act hearings
We will also support you to write letters, make phone calls and make and follow up complaints.
Peer Support
Peer Support is about people who have recovered from mental distress walking alongside tangata whaiora in their recovery journeys.
It is a system of giving and receiving help founded on key principles of respect, shared responsibility and mutual agreement of what is helpful.
Peer support offers a fundamentally different model of supporting people to make sense of their experiences. It can provide people with opportunities to find new ways and strategies to respond.
Peer support relationships validate the reality of a person’s experience outside the context of “illness” or diagnosis. Rather it is built on mutual aid and understanding.
The peer support model challenges the “problem” approach and focuses on discovering and creating innovative and alternative resources, solutions and strategies.
Available for support, information or advocacy.
Service Hours: 9:00am to 4:00pm
Monday-Friday (excluding public holidays)
Email: compass@healthaction.org.nz
Phone number: 0800 212 798
