Home care funding benefits and allowances
Once you decide to obtain home care and support either for yourself or a loved one, you need to establish whether you are entitled to care funding. There are many ways to get the funding you may be entitled to. Some social care funding support is means tested, or health and ability tested, whereas other sources of funding are not. This guide may assist you.
Social care funding support is available subject to your financial circumstances. To find out if you qualify please contact your local social services department.
Once you have been assessed by your local council as somebody who needs personal care support, you will be allocated a ‘Personal Budget’, which you can then use to purchase your care. This sum of money can be paid in the form of Direct Payments, Individual Service Funds (ISFs), or Individual Budgets.
There is a possibility that your local authority will not provide funding to cover everything you would like to be included in your care plan, they may only provide funding to cover basic essentials. In this scenario, you would need to pay privately for any additional services you require.
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This benefit is not subject to your financial circumstances. Instead, it is assessed by taking into account your age and your ability to perform necessary daily living tasks. Please click on the link below to find out more.
Visit NHS Site
If you have a disability, a long-term health condition or a serious illness, then you may be entitled to receive a Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which replaced the previous Disability Living Allowance (DLA). Personal Independence Payments help with extra costs associated with long-term ill-health or disability for people aged 16 to 64.
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Financial assistance for those over 65:
If you are over 65 and physically or mentally disabled you may be eligible to receive Attendance Allowance (AA). The Attendance Allowance is to provide extra help with personal care needs.
Further assistance with care funding:
If you have concerns about funding your care you should visit the Paying For Care website. This is an impartial consumer-focused website providing information on all aspects of care funding, including local authority assessments, care entitlements, costs of care, and arranging care for someone else.
Visit Paying for Care
Self-directed Support
Self-Directed Support (SDS) allows you or your loved one to choose how any support is given, by providing as much ongoing control as needed, over how individual budgets are spent on care support.
In other words, SDS is the way in which a person decides how a pot of money is spent, in order to purchase their required health care services.
SDS offers a number of different options for how an individual can obtain the support they need. Essentially the service user has four options of cover available to them:
Direct payment or cash payment to allow you to arrange support to meet your agreed support plan outcomes.
Whereby the Council or Mi Life Care Services will hold the budget monies, but you are in charge of how it is spent.
The council arranges support on your behalf to meet your support plan outcomes. We can also provide this more traditional form of service delivery as well.
A combination of the above options can also be used if you feel this provides the best solution for you.
Self-Funding
Most Clients who are not eligible for the above help choose to pay privately with their own funds. Please click on the link below to see what your options are.
Visit NHS site