A support plan will include how your personal budget will be spent. Support plans can be written in different ways. They may be long or short – with pictures or just text.
You can write the support plan yourself, have someone else you know and trust to write it for you, or you can have help from your adult care worker. The plan must help you achieve your outcomes.
In Derbyshire, we've designed a standard format for a support plan which is available for you to use and includes everything that needs to be in a plan.
Plan content
We need to make sure that the plan answers the following questions before we can agree it:
- What is important to you?
- What do you want to change or keep, what do you want to achieve?
- How will you be supported to achieve your outcomes, including how any risks will be managed?
- How will you make decisions and stay in control of your life?
- How will your support be managed, including contingency plans?
- How will you take your personal budget and what will the support cost?
- How are you going to put your support plan (your action plan) in place?
Everyone's support plan will be different. The budget can be spent on most things that help you get the life you want.
However, the budget can't be spent on anything that is against the law and it cannot be spent on gambling.
Help writing a support plan
There are lots of people who can help write a plan. Family, friends or your adult care worker can be asked to help.
Independent advocacy
If you have significant difficulty preparing your support plan and have no appropriate family member to help you, you may be entitled to the support of an independent advocate. You can talk to your care worker about this.
Monitoring and review
Once a support plan has been put in place we'll agree with you how we'll monitor its development. This could be very regular contact or an occasional phone call.
If you're receiving a direct payment, we'll use a special additional assessment to decide the level of monitoring and financial audit required. We'll try to make the monitoring process as appropriate as we can to suit your circumstances.
We'll agree with you how often your support plan needs to be reviewed. This should happen at least once a year but could be much more frequent if your requirements are constantly changing.
The review will be tailored to your individual situation. It could be conducted over the phone or involve detailed work between a number of people who will meet with you when your needs are being reviewed.
If there's been significant change since your personal budget was set, then it may be necessary to re-assess your needs and requirements. This may lead to either an increase or decrease in the level of personal budget required to meet eligible social care needs.