Support Planning
Personalisation means thinking about care and support services in an entirely different way. This involves focusing on the person as an individual with strengths, preferences and aspirations and putting them at the centre of the process of identifying their desired outcomes and making choices about how and when they are supported to achieve these outcomes.
The traditional service-led approach has often meant that people have not received the right help at the right time and have been unable to shape the kind of support they need. Personalisation is about giving people much more choice and control over their lives and goes beyond simply giving personal budgets to people eligible for council funding.
Personalisation means:
- tailoring support to people’s individual needs
- ensuring that people have access to information, advocacy and advice to make informed decisions about their care and support
- recognising and supporting carers in their role, while enabling them to maintain a life beyond their caring responsibilities
Self-directed support involves finding out what is important to people with social care needs and their families and friends, and helping them to plan how to use the available money to achieve these desired outcomes.
What is a personal budget?
Personal budgets are an allocation of funding given to users after an assessment the allocation should be sufficient to cover their assessed needs.
As part of self-directed support, the personal budget holder is encouraged to devise a support plan to help them meet their personal outcomes. Assistance in developing this plan can come from care managers, social workers, independent brokerage agencies and family and friends.
Users can either take their personal budget as a direct payment, or, while still choosing how their care needs are met and by whom, leave councils with the responsibility to commission the services. Or a combination of the two.
What is a support plan?
A support plan sets out in detail the ways in which you plan to use your resource allocation to meet your social care needs.
You can also include things in your plan that don’t cost money and/or things that you are planning to pay for yourself.
You can choose to complete your own support plan or you can get assistance with this from either the council or an independent support planner.
We can provide you with more information on the support planning options available to you and can answer any questions you might have about completing your support plan.
All support plans have to be agreed by the council to ensure that your chosen support arrangements:
- Meet your eligible social care needs
- Are within your Resource Allocation
- Keep you safe and well
The cost of your agreed support is the amount of your Individual Budget. The Individual Budget represents the amount of money we believe you require to meet your eligible social care needs. If you do not agree with the amount of money allocated to you. Your first port of call should be to your social worker.
