Assessing needs and paying for care

The assessment will begin when you first contact us or if someone contacts us on your behalf. We will talk to you about your current concerns and difficulties and what you would like to improve and change. It will be important to understand any recent changes in your life.

First of all, we will ask you for your permission to record the information about you on our social care recording system. We may need to share or collect some of this information from other agencies and organisations if we help to arrange support for you. This could include information from your GP. We will keep this information safe and confidential.

We will look at different types of support that can prevent you needing longer term care and give you the opportunity to maintain or regain your independence. For example, we may suggest equipment or changes you could make at home that might help you with the things you find difficult or make it safer for you and/or we will try and link you to community support and resources.

It may be that some support provided for a short period could help you regain the skills and confidence to manage more for yourself, we will usually offer this support before considering ongoing support. If you need further support we will work with you to make decisions about your ongoing needs and whether you are eligible for continued support from the Council. It will also involve having a financial assessment to find out if you need to pay towards the cost of your care.

How will you decide if my needs are eligible for support?

Once we have identified what your needs are, we will use a set of rules to help us decide if you are able to get support from us. These are national rules and you may hear them called the “eligibility threshold” or “eligibility criteria”. If any of your needs are currently being met by a carer or in any other way we will still consider whether those needs are eligible in case you need support in the future. If your needs change or vary from time to time because of your health or situation we will consider this when making decisions about whether you are eligible for
support.

After the assessment we will write to you and explain our decision and the reasons behind it. If you have eligible needs we will work with you to plan your care and support. If you do not have needs that are eligible we will give you information and advice about what care and support is available to help you. For example, this could be from local charities or voluntary organisations.