2781 Assessing your need for care or support

If you find it difficult to carry out your daily activities, you may be eligible for care or support. So that we can find out what you need and whether we can help, we need to carry out something called an assessment. In an assessment, our staff will talk to you about what you can do and what you have difficulty doing, and how this impacts on your well-being. They will also want to know what outcomes are important to you, for example maintaining family or other personal relationships or increasing your working hours. Following the assessment, we will let you know if you have needs that can we can meet. We call these “eligible needs”. We will also discuss with you how you may be able to achieve the outcomes that matter to you. Alongside, we will tell you how much money has been allocated to meeting your “eligible needs”. This is called a “personal budget”. You may have to pay some money towards your care and support, but we will carry out a financial assessment to determine how much you may need to contribute. If however you do not have eligible needs, we will write and tell you and also give you some advice and information on what other support there may be within the local area. If you think you need an assessment, you can arrange for us to provide one by finding more information about services on our website or by contacting us by email or phone We may be able to help you over the phone or by email, but if we cannot do this we may arrange to visit you in your home to carry out a more detailed assessment. If you have someone who helps to care for you, we may recommend a joint assessment, and if you have difficulties with communication you will be entitled to have someone to represent you and help you during the assessment process. Please let us know about this when you contact us so that we can make sure we put the right arrangements in place for you.