Information for family and friend carers

Working out how much money you need

We use the information from your assessment to work out how much money is available to meet your needs. The ‘resource allocation system’ is a fair way to allocate money to anyone who needs support and we use it for everyone. The money you receive is called your personal budget.

What’s in your support plan?

The plan must include:
• your eligible social care needs;
• what outcomes you want to achieve for each of your needs;
• whether or not you need help to achieve these outcomes; and
• what help you need to achieve your outcomes. This will include support that we have agreed to provide.

Carer’s personal budget

If your needs are being met by council-funded social care support, you will have a personal budget. We will usually pay this as a one-off direct payment. Please see the 'Direct payments: part one' page for more information.

You might want to use a direct payment to pay for a community service that helps you take a break from caring, or perhaps gym membership or a piece of equipment that would make your life easier.

Reviewing your support

A review gives us the opportunity to discuss your support with you to make sure that it is working well and helping you to carry out your role as a carer. A member of staff at Carers Support West Sussex will carry out your review if they carried out your assessment. If one of our social care workers carried out your assessment, we will carry out your review.

If you have a carer’s support plan, we will contact you within the first six to eight weeks to check whether your needs have been met.

If everything is working well for you, we will tell you who to contact if anything changes. If you feel your needs are not being met, we will look at your situation again to see what other support you may need.

We will also offer you another review after a year.