Community care is the primary mission of QueerCare - we wish to build a culture where communities care for their own without needing to reach out to institutional care, covering everything from ensuring nutrition and social support through advanced mental health response and first aid, minimising strain on primary care, and improving outcomes for the queer community.
We primarily care about and for queer communities, and spend most of our time doing simple, boring public health and advocacy. But queer people also go on protests a lot, so we help organise first aid and care support for protests.
Where we can’t provide care, we help people access other services that can help them. We train and dispatch advocates across the country.
Our advocates are not independent mental capacity advocates - such a role implies a control over capacity we are not willing to be complicit in - we stand for the patient’s wishes regardless of what the medical system has determined their capacity to be. We are willing to push not just through official channels but through a diversity of tactics.
Frontline care is incredibly important, but providing the knowlege to back it up is what makes it possible- every year we file hundreds of freedom of information requests, tracking everything from waiting times to deportations in the nhs, and write and review thousands of words of guides on research.