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How can we get respite?

vic75

How can we get respite from our 9 year Severey Autistic child. We are at our wits end as no one is listening to us and the whole family is falling apart.

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Comments

Antonia_Alumni

Hi @vic75 welcome to the community. Thank you for sharing this with us. I am sorry to hear this. You may be interested in our page on finding respite care and your local carers centre may be able to support you and family with respite.

Kate_Scope

hi @vic75
I can see that Antonia has given you the links to the pages here on the scope website.
I just wanted to ask has your son got a social worker at all?
It may be worth talking to your Gp to get a referral put in place. It is social services that arrange respite and they can do an assessment to see if you qualify as a family.
It can be such a hard conclusion to come to, but by admitting you need some form of support you are really doing the right thing.
let us know how you get on?

Kate

zeesmum

Hi could you clarify for me because I have been on the links and my daughter seems to qualify in nearly all categories as She has quadriplegic cerebral palsy, is a wheelchair user, cannot feed/dress herself, is doubly incontenant, has a sleep disorder and started puberty before she was two, I am a single parent. But it seems that because she is very intelligent and I have fought to have her attend mainstream school with a support worker that we are not entitled to any respite care. We have an early years intervention worker who has told me that she is only staying involved until we have settled in our new house and the social services won’t get involved as I am a good mother and am coping with caring for my daughter myself. Therefore she’s not a child in need.She is five on Sunday and I have had two full nights sleep in five years as my mum had her one night and older daughter had her the 2nd night but she was too much for them so it’s never happened since. Does anyone know where I can go from here for help getting respite?

Doris_Scope

Hi @vic75

Have you contacted your local authority to request an assessment of needs. Below is a link to a website called Sense which also has an information and help phone line -

0300 330 9256 and states what your rights are (below).

http://https//www.sense.org.uk/

Your right to an assessment

To determine whether your child may be entitled to social care support, you will need to ask your local authority to carry out an assessment of their needs. The assessment is the start of the process to decide if services are needed and for you to tell the local authority about your child and family’s needs.

Following acceptance of a referral by the local authority children's social care service, a social worker will lead a multi-agency assessment.

The purposes of social care assessments are:

To gather important information about your child and family.
To analyse your child’s needs.
To decide whether your child is a child ‘in need’ (as defined in section 17 of the Children Act 1989).
To provide support to address those needs to improve the child's outcomes.

If the local authority decides that social care is necessary, then it must fund a sufficient level of services to meet the needs which were identified in the assessment.

@zeesmum

Again, it sounds as though you really could do with some respite. Have you been through the full assessment with your local authority? It may be worth speaking to your early years intervention worker about the assessment if you haven't already had one, or ring Sense for some advice.

Hope this helps.

zeesmum

Thanks for the information Beverly I will ask my early years worker to put a referral in when she finally gets round to replying to me. I am still a little unsure about involving the social services as I have heard some horror stories about them completely taking over but it seems the only way to access any respite care and I desperately need a regular break, even just time to sleep never mind time to myself.
Apologies to vic75 for hijacking your post.
I will let you know how I get on Beverly x

Doris_Scope

Good luck

@zeesmum

Try not to worry about involving social services. They are there to help.
Hopefully something will come of it and you will get some much needed time to yourself.

Doris

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