What is a support plan?

If, following an assessment to determine your needs, you are eligible for support from Shropshire Council, you will have the opportunity to design a Care and Support Plan.

Your Care and Support Plan will detail how your needs will be met, how you propose to meet specific outcomes and what it is you need to have in place to succeed. Once completed, your Care and Support Plan will give us an indication of any proposed costs that may be involved to meet your needs. At this stage, we refer to this as an indicative budget.

Your Care and Support Plan and indicative budget will need to be formally approved and signed by both the council and you before you can formally make any arrangements.

What should I include in my support plan?

Your assessment will have identified which of your needs are deemed to be eligible and therefore must be included in your Care and Support Plan. You will need to include how these specific needs and outcomes will be managed. This will need to include specified activities such as personal care and nutrition; it will need to include how often the support needs to be in place and any applicable costs. Not all support plans will result in an indicative budget because it may be deemed appropriate for you to have the support that you need from local community resources, or you may decide that friends and family are going to provide you with regular support.

Why do I need to set goals and timescales?

When considering what it is you want to achieve, you must refer to your eligible needs and outcomes as determined in your assessment. The outcomes are specific and we will want to know which of these you are focussing on, how you propose to achieve them and in what time frame. At the point of your reassessment in the future, we will refer back to these to examine what has worked and what may need to be altered. This will be the opportunity to make any necessary changes to your support plan. Once again, any changes will need to be approved before they can formally take place.

Coping with changes – having the flexibility I need

Life is full of changes and no Care and Support Plan will include every eventuality. If you are in receipt of a personal budget, these are intended to be flexible and responsive to your changing situation so that you don’t have to come back to the council to agree every little change that you need to make. If you feel you need to make changes to your Care and Support Plan then please contact our First Point of Contact team (FPoC) on 0345 678 9044 and a skilled adviser will discuss this further with you.