Care Assessment

Definition: Assessment by Social Services of you need for community care services

Local authority Social Services departments are responsible for assessing individual people’s need for community care services, and arranging or providing services to meet their identified personal care needs. Community care services include home care, respite care, day care, provision of disability aids and meals on wheels. Taking Government guidelines into account, each local authority sets its own eligibility criteria for these services and can charge for services they provide or arrange.

Care assessments are also called Needs Assessments and they are for people who are carers, or those who appear to need a community care service, and disabled people. Assessments are free of charge.

If the assessment determines that services should be arranged or provided for someone, the authority will then usually carry out a financial assessment to establish how much the person should contribute towards the cost of these services. This is called a Fairer Charging Assessment.

Whilst local authorities can directly provide services or arrange for private or voluntary organisations to provide the care, they also have to offer Direct Payments to older people who meet their criteria for care. Providing they have been assessed as needing help, this enables them to buy their own services. The individual can choose to use either Direct Payments or ask the authority to arrange the services.

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