Devon County Council

The government and local councils want to help people stay healthy and living independently for as long as possible. This theme will ensure that people have the choice and control over their own planning and support

You can hear all about it on this six minute video clip from the Department of Health.

We are working to provide more Personal Budgets for the people we support, enabling people to have knowledge of the sum of money which is available to them to support their needs, and to have greater control over what it is spent on.  We want to make sure you

• have more choice and control in your life
• better support for carers
• make sure you get the right help at the right time
• know exactly how much you will have available to spend
• have support that is tailor-made to meet your needs
• have access to a range of excellent, quality services provided by highly skilled staff
• have easy access to information, advice, support and advocacy.

We are encouraging more person-centred and outcome based planning, focusing less on traditional services and more on the outcomes that a client wants in their life and developing the best means of achieving those outcomes.

Self Directed Support is the way people who are eligible for social care decide:

• what support or help they need
• when the support is used
• who provides the support.

At the heart of Self Directed Support is the recognition that the service user is the person best placed to understand their needs. We will be investigating additional methods of helping clients develop their person-centred plans including them completing them themselves and with help from other agencies.

One way we can give you more control is by assessing your social care needs and letting you know how much we can spend to meet those needs - your personal budget.

• We have answered some frequently asked questions (FAQs) on personal budgets.
• You may find factsheet FS7 Personal Budgets useful.

We have interviewed several people in Devon to bring together a collection of powerful case studies.Their Devon stories explain how we are improving people's experience of adult social care, giving more choice and control, and putting the people of Devon at the heart of the decision-making process...

Read the story of Paul, from Exeter whose life has been tranformed and the story of Linda who wants other people to get the most out of their lives, just like she does, by using Direct Payments.

You can read or watch some national personal stories of real people's experiences.  The video clips were made by the Department of Health as a result of their Individual Budgets Pilot.and they help to explain the benefits of having more choice and control in the way services are arranged.

You may prefer to have services arranged by us in the traditional way - or - you may wish to arrange those services yourself to be more flexible in exactly how you choose to meet your needs.
How people will spend their personal budget and what they will want to buy will be as varied as the individuals themselves. Broadly, we know that what the person chooses to buy must:

• meet their agreed needs and outcomes
• be safe and legal
• be affordable.

Some examples of how a personal budget and direct payment can work in practice

We can support you to do this.  At present we can do this by offering you a Direct Payment but in future there may be other ways of providing your personal budget.