How do I get care and support?
- By Nick
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When you’re looking for care and support there are a number of things that you can do to make getting the help you need a bit easier.
Understanding Need
Having a clear understanding of what you need help with is a great start – YtB has developed a care needs helper which will take you through the different elements that you may want to consider.
For many people the simple act of thinking about their Care Needs is a useful exercise, regardless of whether they are hoping to get the Local Authority to help out with the cost. This gives you a chance to discuss elements members of your family and friends, and give some detail so that together you can start to formulate a plan.
Understanding Risk
Taking risks is a part of everyday life, through taking risks we learn – if we never took a risk we’d never have taken our first steps as a baby, but there are times when it’s useful to have a quick look at the risks in a little more detail. The term ‘Risk Assessment’ sounds incredibly formal but basically it’s simply looking at
- What are the benefits of doing something?
- What could go wrong?
- How likely is it that something will go wrong?
- What would be the impact if something did go wrong?
- Are the risk acceptable or can they be reduced?
You can carry out your own risk assessment by looking at the needs document that you’ve created listing out anything that could go wrong. You can then build into your plan ways of reducing risks where you can, if you wanted to do it more formally (in the way we’d expect your carer to do) then you can always use a formal risk assessment template.
Make a Plan
Once you have identified all the needs and risks that you may have, it’s time to start working out what you can do to meet these needs. Part of that plan may be approaching the relevant local council to see whether they can help you both financially and with further local information – try our postcode checker to see which Local Council is responsible for care in your area. Part of the plan could simply be working out how best your friends and family can help you in the future. Once you’ve identified all your needs its far easier to see exactly what needs doing…
When you start making your plan, it may be useful to consider the elements such as
- Staying healthy
- doing things for yourself around the house
- keeping safe
- dealing with emergencies
All of which are covered in a little more detail in our article How do I make a care plan?
Deciding which method to get care and/or support
You may wish to employ someone yourself, or contract with them rather than employing them, alternatively you may want to leave it to a provider to deal with or move to more residential care – or you may want to have a combination of different approaches. Try looking at our information on care and support choices to help you work out what’s best for you.
Employing or Contracting Directly
Check out our articles on what you need to know to employ your own staff or contract with people to provide services.
First Steps
One of the first things that you might like to do is have a look at The Directory, to find organisations as well as paid carers that work in your area.
- Published on May 08, 2018