Ceredigion County Council

In order to receive any service from Social Services we will need to carry out an assessment of the needs of the person who requires help.

This is called an Assessment of needs and will look at what difficulties you are facing, what is important to how both your needs and wishes may be supported and whether you are eligible for assistance from Social Services.

The assessment may take place over the telephone (if your needs are simple and straightforward) or involve a visit to your home if you have more complex needs or a full professional assessment is required.

The assessment may be carried out by a non-qualified professional (for simple, straightforward needs) or by a social worker or Occupational Therapist. Some assessments may be completed jointly with a health professional for example, community nurse. You can have family, friend or carer with you during the assessment if you require support or if they wish to help you describe the difficulties that you are having.

The assessment will enable us to:

• Understand the difficulties that you are experiencing
• Identify what matters to you
• What would assist you in achieving your aims
• What help or support you already receive from other people / agencies
• Discuss what services (either through ourselves or the wider community) are available to further support you

For example:

• If you are having difficulty in standing to prepare a hot meal, we would firstly assess your ability to reheat a frozen meal as this would give you a choice of when and what you ate
• If you are returning home from hospital following a hip operation (for example), and are having difficulty dressing your lower body, the hospital will provide you with equipment to enable you to be independent in these tasks. You may require a short period of prompting and supervision to give you confidence to use the equipment when you return home and Social Services may be able to provide a short period of assistance to help you with this
• If you have more substantial needs, there may still be some things that you are able to improve and we will explore these with you. For those personal care and daily living tasks that you are not able to complete, we may be able to provide a long term package of care which will enable you to remain in your own home

Unless you have a high level of support needs, the help that we provide will be for a short time only and is provided via our Enablement Service.