Priority 5 - Assessment and Support

This strategy supports the discharge of the council’s legal duties to adult carers, parent carers and young carers under the Care Act 2014 and the Children and Families Act 2014 respectively, and to parent carers where their child is approaching adulthood and young carers who are approaching adulthood. To achieve this, we will:

1. Review and amend (as necessary) the pathway for carers to ensure a single equitable access to support for Carers regardless of the specific needs of the citizen i.e. Learning Disability, Physical Disability, Mental Health, Young Carer, Older person;
2. Review (and amend as necessary) our current commissioned carers assessment and support arrangements to ensure the most effective and affordable support arrangements are in place to deliver support to Carers equitably across the communities of Staffordshire;
3. Review (and amend as necessary) our current carers self-directed support offer e.g. carers direct payments, with a view to making our offer easier to navigate for both carers and professionals;
4. Encourage Carer Support providers to work together in true collaboration with each other, the Council, the NHS and other key stakeholders for the greater good of Carers;
5. Work collaboratively with Carer Support organisations to avoid duplication of support in the different localities;
6. Explain carers rights to an assessment and routinely offer one on the appearance of need, explaining the benefits of an assessment to the carer;
7. Offer information advice and guidance for all Carers, as well as signposting to support from their community;
8. Where an assessment identifies eligible needs, we will look to meet these with support from their local community in the first instance, avoiding the need for statutory provision wherever possible and financially prudent to do so;
9. Work with other agencies so that they are aware of carers rights to an assessment and know how to refer a carer for an assessment;
10. Whenever possible, recognise carers as experts and essential contributors to the assessment of the person they care for;
11. Improve our identification, referral, assessment pathways for young carers and offer appropriate levels of support, taking into account the age and needs of the young carer, its impact on other areas of their life and the issues affecting those they provide care for;
12. Ensure that support such as social activities and clubs, where possible and reasonable, are available at a time most suited to the carer, taking into consideration work, education and caring commitments;
13. Adopt a whole family approach to assessment across the whole system, with practitioners from all parts of the system working in a spirit of collaboration so that the needs of adult carers, young carers and those they care for are identified and responded to appropriately;
14. Improve our assessment pathways for parent carers whose child is preparing for adulthood and for young carers approaching adulthood;
15. Undertake work to provide an option of a digital self-assessment form which carers can complete at a time to suit their caring commitments;
16. Record assessment information in a timely way, making sure it is comprehensive, accurate, stored safely and shared according to the standards required under data protection legislation so that the need for carers to repeat their story is kept to a minimum.