Are You A Carer?

- Do you or someone you care for have substantial health or disability?

- Do you think you may be eligible for Direct Payments or Individualised Budgets?

- Are you interested in taking up Direct Payments, Individualised Budgets or having more control over the type of service you or your family receive?

- Are you a community group, day centre or any other organisation... supporting people with substantial health needs or disabilities or their carers, and interested in our campaign to create more awareness of Direct Payments & Individualised Budgets for your users or local community?

We Can Help You

• Interested in Direct Payments?

• Interested in Individualised Budgets?
  

• Want to manage your own services?
  

• Want more culturally appropriate services?

1. Setting the Budget: A simple assessment of need leads to the identification of an indicative budget sum, bringing together a variety of funding streams (eg. social care services; Supporting People; Disabled Facilities Grant), and the provision of appropriate support to the client to decide and manage this process.
2. Plan the Support: Once people are aware of the level of funding they need to work out how best to use it to meet their support needs. The Support Plan will describe what the individual wants to change or maintain in their lives and how they will use their individual budget to do this.
3. Agree the Plan: The proposed plan, once defined would require agreement from the local authority. If the plan could not be brought in within the individual budget level allocated, this would need to be addressed.
4. Manage the Individual Budget and organise support: There are a number of different ways that the individual budget can be deployed. This gives individuals real choice over the day-to-day involvement they have in managing the support. One approach is by using Direct Payments - a cash payment in lieu of social care provision to the individual. Alternatively, an indirect payment may be spent on behalf of someone, according to his or her support plan, by an agent. This may be someone close to the individual (eg. a family member) or someone paid to undertake this role, for example in a local voluntary sector organisation. Another approach could be through a care manager – who might either arrange Local Authority provided services or contract manage an individually specified service with a service provider.
5. Live Life: The person will live their life, using the resources allocated to deliver the plan.
6. Review and Learn: The review process will show how well the outcomes set out in the support plan have been achieved, and what has been learnt along the way. This will be a process undertaken as a partnership between the person and the Local Authority.