Adult Social Care Eligibility Criteria

Our Responsibility: A General Duty of Wellbeing

The Care Act 2014 sets out a number of new rights for adults who choose to access support from services, carers and families from the centre of adult social care and new duties for City of Bradford Council. These rights are underpinned by a general duty on the Council to promote the wellbeing of all our citizens.

Our approach in delivering our duties under the under the Care Act will be centred around a rational and compassionate approach.

What will Home First mean

We will work with people who choose to access support from services, their carers and family members and our communities to develop new systems which build on their strengths. Strengths based approaches involve:

• Making information and advice easily accessible so that people can make informed decisions about their support needs

• Early intervention which builds on people’s natural networks of support

• Ensuring that all practicable steps are taken to ensure the wishes, feelings and beliefs of people who have long term support needs from the services are communicated, understood and upheld.

We will do this by:

• Listening to people

• Improving the accessibility of our information about options

• Finding personalised solutions

• Being proactive to support for self-care which supports healthier lives

• Helping early to delay and prevent minor things developing into something major

• Strengthening and investing in our Social Workers and the culture of social work

• Transferring power away from traditional services to people, their families and communities

• Using technology

• Treating all people with dignity and respect

• Striving to get you home as quickly as possible – after being in hospital

• Establishing arrangements to uphold and enable people’s right to take positive risks

• Ensuring that where a person is at risk of abuse that we put in place measures that ensure they remain in control

• Where a person requires the deprivation of liberty safeguards we take all practicable steps to ensure their rights are upheld.

For more information about Home First please see the document at the bottom of this page within the resource file

How Will We Do This - Personal Budgets

In order to deliver our approach, we will use a personal budget process which will include the following steps:

1. Resource Allocation System (RAS) -  An indicative personal budget is calculated to reflect the level of support required to meet the assessed eligible need.

2. Support Plan - A plan that identifies how people will spend the money allocated to them through their personal budget to get the life they want.

3. Approving the Support Plan - The Council will have to sign off the approved support plan before the personal budget is released.

4. Personal Budget - People will have four options for using their personal budget:

a) Direct Payment (DP) – Money paid by the Council to an eligible person (or someone acting on their behalf) so that they may arrange their own care and support instead of receiving arranged services. Records of how the money is spent are audited regularly.

b) Individual Service Fund (ISF) – Money given to a third party (fund holding provider) to hold on behalf of the person and used to pay for care and support services in line with the support plan.

c) Managed Care – Services that are arranged by the Council; people who use them have less choice and control over how they are delivered.

d) Combination of the above - A DP may be used to manage some of the care and support services arranged to meet a person’s needs with the rest arranged through a managed ISF arrangement.