Our Community Health and Care Partnership (CHCP) provides or arranges a wide range of services to help you live as independently as possible in your own home and community. Once your needs have been assessed, our CHCP staff draw up a care plan for you and, in partnership with you, decide how your needs can best be met.

The care plan should be firmly based on your own needs for care and support, as identified in your needs assessment. You should make sure that you see what we think you need, and tell us if we have missed something.

Paying for services

When deciding upon the services required to meet your needs, your case worker is allowed to take the cost into account. This is because we have to pay for most or all of these services.

We must not charge you for information or for an assessment, but we are allowed to charge for care services. However, we must take into account whether you can afford the charges and we must consider whether to waive them if you ask us to.

Your case worker is not limited to services provided by our Social Work department. She or he can buy in services from outside agencies, so long as these services are available at a reasonable cost, and they are at least as good quality as our Social Work department's standards. A ‘flexible budget’ is available to case workers to meet this sort of cost.

You might be able to get money to pay wages for a carer in your own home, through the Independent Living Fund and a special Independent Living Services (ILS) scheme. You can find out more about this on the ILS website:

Why haven’t I received the services I want?

We aim to give you as much choice as we possibly can. However, we aren't obliged to meet your needs in the way you might prefer. If we decide that your needs can be met in ways that you don't agree with, you can ask us to reconsider by using the Care Concerns complaints procedures - see the Useful contacts section below.

Although it may be acknowledged in your Needs Assessment that you really need a particular kind of help, it might be that this need doesn't get met. This might be because:

  • it has been decided that the need is too expensive to meet

  • the case worker can't find a way to meet your need

If you don't get the services you need, you should get advice from an independent advocacy service - again, see the Useful contacts section below.

Useful contacts

If you want us to reconsider any of our decisions about your care needs and/or services, you can raise your concerns through the care complaints procedure:

If you disagree with any of our decisions or charges, you should seek advice from an advocacy service: