AccessAva has been developed by Access Social Care – a charity that supports communities to increase knowledge of the law and rights, providing free legal advice and information for people with health and social care needs. 

AccessAva helps users to answer legal questions and points them to the resources, including legal letters, that can resolve health and social care problems early on. Users are asked a series of questions designed to classify their situation and identify what the legal issue might be. They select their answer from a set of pre-populated buttons which allows AccessAva to serve the correct resource or legal letter that addresses that specific situation. It also helps useful data to be collected to inform system change. 

We know how important it is to have access to information when you need it. People with social care needs and their families and supporters are often short of time. We do our best to make our systems reliable. But we cannot guarantee that AccessAva will always be available when you need it. 

• Available 24/7: ensures support is always accessible. 

• Accessible: tailored for diverse communities and needs. 

• Accurate: content verified by qualified lawyers. 

• Analytics: provides data insights for strategic planning and improvement. 

• Advanced: employs award-winning technology to optimise resource use and service delivery. 

AccessAva provides legal information about social care law in England. When AccessAva talks about the law it means the law in England. AccessAva should not be used to seek legal information for someone who lives outside England.

AccessAva is designed to give legal information to older or disabled people, their families, and those providing care and support or information to older or disabled people.  

We want as many people as possible to be able to understand and uphold their rights. We are working to make AccessAva as easy to read and the information as straightforward to understand as we can. However, we recognise that the law is a complex system and some people will not be able to use AccessAva effectively themselves. Where needed, we hope that families and supporters will be able to use AccessAva to share the information with the person in need of care and support in a way that works for them. We will continue to work to make AccessAva accessible.  

You can find easy read information about AccessAva at the end of this page. 

When you use AccessAva, we will ask for your postcode. We ask you this because we want to improve access to social care services. One of the ways we do this is to capture data about people’s experience of social care services and identify specific issues facing people in different geographical areas. We will use what we learn to argue for better social care in your area. 

When you use AccessAva, will ask for your email address. We ask for this information so that we can send you a follow-up email with a record of our conversation and then contact you one more time to suggest further actions that might help your situation. Please do not enter names, contact details, or any information that could identify anyone else, for example a family member or a person that you support. This type of information is called personal data. We do not have a way of getting consent to store these details from that person, and we do not need their information for AccessAva to work. 

If you do enter personal information on AccessAva, it will be stored on our platform for up to 14 days. We will not share this information outside of Access Social Care and our technical partners, unless we have to by law. We will delete it after 14 days.  

We use other information you provide in your chat to try to improve the lives of people who need care and support. One of the things AccessAva can do is to spot if lots of people are having the same problem in a particular area. We want to use this information to try to make sure that local authorities and other public bodies follow the law.  

We are committed to ensuring that AccessAva is accessible to everyone. So, after your chat, we may ask you a few questions about yourself to help us check that we are reaching a wide audience.  

You can read more about how AccessAva uses your personal data here.  

AccessAva provides information on subjects that can be life-changing for older or disabled people and their families and supporters. AccessAva is designed to give you information about the law based on your questions and answers in AccessAva. We know how important it is to get this right.  

We make every effort to make sure that the content we put on AccessAva is correct. All of the information included on AccessAva is written or checked by qualified lawyers. But there are some things you need to know: 

• The law is complicated, so we have simplified it on AccessAva. This means that we cannot guarantee that AccessAva will always be relevant to your exact situation.  

• The law changes often. Each time the law changes, we will update AccessAva. We carry out regular testing and review all the resources that it signposts users to at least once every two years. However, we are only human and sometimes things get missed or mistakes are made. AccessAva is digital and sometimes technology goes wrong. Because of this we cannot guarantee that it will always give everyone accurate and up to date information which is relevant to them.  

• AccessAva is designed to give you information about the law based on your questions and answers. Getting information about the law from AccessAva is not the same as getting legal advice about your own situation from a qualified lawyer. If you think that you might need legal advice, you can find details of solicitors here.  

We ask for your feedback regularly, and we are committed to making changes where you have said that AccessAva was not helpful.  

Sometimes other organisations will be the experts in the subject you ask about. Where we point you to external resources, we will assess the reliability of that organisation’s resources and services, and we will let you know if you can expect a charge for the services they offer. However, we are not responsible for the content of other websites and a link to another site does not mean that we endorse the content. 

You can find easy read information about social care across the conversations on AccessAva. You can also select browse resources from the menu and go directly to easy read information on different topics.

The following resources are designed to help you and the people you support think about these issues. 

ER162: AccessAva - This document helps to explain the purpose and how to use AccessAva. 

ER163: About AccessAva- This document provides an overview about what AccessAva tries to do. 

ER173: How we use your information - This explains why we store information, how long we keep the information and how we use the information which a person has consented for us to use. 

We understand that occasionally issues may arise, and we are dedicated to resolving them promptly and effectively. If you would like to make a complaint about AccessAva, please visit Access Social Care’s complaints policy and process page.