Direct Payment
These are payment given to you after your needs have been assessed by your Local Authority. Once your assessment of needs is completed the Authority will then allocate an amount of fund that will be deemed sufficient to meet your eligible needs. The benefit of this is it empowers you greater choices of services that best suit your immediate needs.

Personal Budget
Personal Budgets are an allocation of funding given to you after an assessment which should be sufficient to meet your assessed needs.

The flexibility a personal budget is that it gives you a choice of having the fund as direct payment for you to decide on your service or you can leave the council with the responsibilities to commission the services or you can have a combination of the two. In any case you decide how your care and support needs are met and by whom.

You need to be aware that like all community care services, direct payments are means-tested so their value is dependent on your income and assets as well as your entitled needs.

CareMax can help you by offering you a wide variety of choice for you to choose from that will meet your needs without compromising your budget. We will explain all the benefits of direct funding to you to let you make an informed choice such as:

Decision-making
We will help you decide whether a direct payment or council-managed personal budget is right for you.

Risk management and enablement
We will empower you to manage risks when delivering your care and support, and support you taking these calculated risks to safeguard your welfare.

Challenging the size of a personal budget
Whenever we feel that your personal budget is insufficient to meet your needs we will work with you and your social worker so that your case can be taken to a council funding panel.

Support planning
We will draw up a support plan in partnership with you and your family implement the plan accordingly.

Review
We will keep your care and support needs under review to ensure they are successfully meeting your needs.