Eligibility first

First you should have had a Care Act assessment with a social worker/practitioner and confirmed that you're eligible for council support. 'Eligible' means meeting certain rules to access paid support from us. The eligibility threshold is based on three questions: 

• Your needs for care and support arise from certain health problems 
• As a result, you're unable to do certain things or 'outcomes' 
• There's a significant impact on your wellbeing 

These areas are explained more please see link to pre support plan file:///C:/Users/cc105382/Documents/Pre-support-plan.pdf 

We must legally set out how we'll meet your eligible needs and goals in a ‘care and support plan’.

Good conversations and planning

You need to be involved with support planning as you need to make the important decisions about the type of support you want to receive.  

Together (this can include your family/friends or an advocate if you need one, which your social worker can arrange) you should start to have a conversation about who and what's important to you and what you want to achieve to meet your agreed eligible needs and goals.  

Writing a one-page profile can help.

Eventually all this will be all be written in your support plan, which will be very individual to you and your individual goals. Individual goals are linked to eligibility, for example:

• Help getting dressed ready for work in the morning
• Learning, with support, how to prepare your meals safely
• Having support to access a college course

The support plan will show how you plan to use support to meet your goals. A direct payment may be included in your support plan, eg to pay a personal assistant to support you to learn how to prepare meals safely for x number of hours a week, to be reviewed in three months. The plan can also include how you're supported in other areas informally. For example you may have some support from your family helping you with paperwork and shopping. 

You can write a support plan yourself or with the help of family/an advocate, but we'd like to keep a copy of it. Your social worker will still need to write one with you to add to our database so that money can be allocated from our systems in finance. You'll be given a copy. 

Agreement of plan 

Your social worker/practitioner needs to arrange and get agreement for the funding (cost) of the paid support on your plan (and you'll be financially assessed to see if you must contribute to this).  

They'll send a copy of your agreed support plan to you to check that you're happy with it, to sign it if you are, and to keep a copy so that you're aware of what was agreed together. You'll then know the sort of support you're going to have, how frequent it is and what it will cost. Most importantly you should know why you're getting this support and the goals you're working towards.  

There's also a direct payment agreement at the end of your support plan, which you need to read and sign, as it's an agreement between you and the council on the terms (rules) of having a direct payment. You can discuss this more with your social worker. 

An example of a support plan

To follow...