Budget for care but impossible to find - no equipment either

Hi @Christinepc

Welcome to the community. I’m sorry there has been a longer than usual delay in me responding to your post, unfortunately I have been unwell for a few days.

It sounds as if you have extensive experience of the health and social care sector, both personally and professionally, so I’m not sure that there is much that I will be able to say that you are not already aware of. However, your post raises a number of important issues that I want to try to acknowledge point by point:

1. Lack of mental health support – if you have been assessed as needing mental health support and it isn’t being providing you need to flag that up with them. If necessary escalating it up the line of management or making a formal complaint. Alternatively, if the professionals involved with your care feel that at the moment you are not sufficiently unwell to meet their threshold for ongoing services, and you disagree with their decision, you will need to talk to them again. A GP can sometimes be a good person to talk to initially if you are not currently under the care of a community mental health team. It might also be worth exploring voluntary sector mental health organisations such as Sane http://www.sane.org.uk/ or Mind https://www.mind.org.uk/ to see if they can offer you any support.

2. Unable to obtain care using personal budget – if you have been assessed as needing care, and you are not receiving it, this isn’t a situation that you should allow to go unaddressed. Unfortunately, we have known local authorities argue that if someone has been ‘coping’ without receiving the care that they were originally assessed as needing that this is evidence that person is able to manage ok without it. Therefore, I would advise that you contact the local authority as soon as possible and pursue one of the two possible solutions to this situation: a) that as you haven’t been able to arrange your care yourself you want them to provide it for you instead of having direct payments or b) that you can evidence that your budget is inadequate to get care in your rural location and therefore you need them to look at it again to find a solution that would make it workable (i.e. allow extra money to pay mileage for a carer to drive to your home or offer a more attractive hourly rate).

3. Feeling lonely – it known that loneliness and isolation can have a really negative impact on a person’s well-being. As Daugjtet1 has already said getting involved with an online community, such as this one, can help to ease isolation. The voluntary sector organisations I have already mentioned might also have some ideas for ways that you could make contact with others. Libraries and community centres are often good sources of information about what is happening locally, although I appreciate that accessing them is not always possible for those living rurally.     

4. Managing without disability equipment – it is hard to comment on this without knowing what equipment it is that you feel that you need and what steps have already been tried to obtain it. Perhaps you could tell me a bit more about what the difficulty is?

Best Wishes

Jean