Adult social care assessment

Adult social care assessments are free of charge and are available for anyone over the age of 18, who might need help. An assessment is the way we establish what a person’s strengths are and which areas they may need support with.

Your assessment is a joint process between you and a social worker or care professional. Your adult social care assessment will generally be completed within 28 days from our contact with you. A social care practitioner or social care assessor will contact you and arrange a phone call or a visit.

If we think that you might be unable to make a decision yourself about whether to have an assessment, and you have no one legally appointed to make decisions for you, we will make a best interests decision to decide if an assessment is the right thing for you. Please see our Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA) page for further information on how we use the MCA in practice.

The Care Act 2014

The Care Act 2014 replaced most previous law regarding carers and people being cared for. It outlines the way in which local authorities should carry out carer’s assessments and needs assessments; how local authorities should determine who is eligible for support; how local authorities should charge for both residential care and community care; and places new obligations on local authorities.

For more information, watch the video or visit GOV.UK.

Completing an assessment

Complete the ‘Adult Social Care Referral’ online form.
Contact the Single Point of Access (SPA) on 01472 256256.

Before we start

Before we start the assessment, we need to know whether you can fully take part in it or whether you have significant difficulties which might mean you need extra support with the assessment. We may talk to you about getting more support with your assessment, if you have difficulties with any of the following:

understanding the information we give you
retaining the information
using or weighing up the information as part of the process of being involved
communicating views, wishes or feelings

Making sure you have the right support will mean you get the best out of the assessment. Support with the assessment might come from someone you know and trust, such as a family member or friend, from a trained advocate.

For more information on how an advocate may be able to support you, please see our advocacy page.

Stages of your Adult Social Care assessment

There are four stages to an adult social care assessment:

How is my assessment carried out?
How do we decide whether any of your assessed needs should be met by the Local Authority (Focus).
How do we complete a plan for how your identified needs are going to be met. At this stage we will also discuss your personal budget and how you might use it.
How do we find out who much you may need to contribute towards your support.

STEP 1

An adult social care assessment starts with a conversation with you about what your strengths are and what you might need help with. We will ask you if you have any support from the people in your life. This can include friends, family members or support groups. This helps us to understand who you have in your life that might help you to achieve what you want to. We call this your support network.

We can help you think about what you might need, for example by:

understanding your strengths and the things you enjoy, as well as the areas of your life that may be difficult for you. This will include your cultural or spiritual needs.
supporting you to understand your situation and what you can do to reduce or delay the need for social care support.
identifying needs that could be reduced or delayed by providing short term support (reablement).
understanding how you manage throughout the day with practical tasks.
Establishing how your needs impact on your daily life and your well-being.
Understanding the needs of your carer if you have one.
Understanding what you would like to be able to achieve/ your goals in life.
Understanding the risks that you face or are likely to face and how to manage them.

STEP 2

Your assessor will decide whether you are eligible for support by working through with you the eligibility criteria set out below. We will discuss with you, your family and carers, what options are available to you.

Eligibility

During your assessment, we will consider with you how your needs effect your wellbeing and consider what you’d like to achieve in your day-to-day life. We use the national eligibility criteria to help us decide if you are eligible to get support from us.

The three questions we will consider with you are:

Are your needs related to a physical or mental impairment or illness?
Because of your needs, are you unable to do two or more of the things listed here?
- Eating and drinking
- Maintaining personal hygiene
- Managing toilet needs
- Being appropriately clothed (dressed)
- Being able to make use of your home safely
- Keeping your home clean, safe and hygienic
- Developing and maintaining family or other personal relationships
- Accessing and engaging in work, training, education or volunteering
- Using necessary facilities or services in the local community including public transport, recreational facilities or services
- Carrying out any caring responsibilities you have for a child
If so, is there or is there likely to be a significant effect on your wellbeing as a result?

We might think the effect on your wellbeing is significant if it will have an important or a major effect on your daily life and independence. If the answer to all three questions is yes, you will have eligible needs for care and support.

How it is assessed

You are assessed as being unable to do the things we’ve listed above if you:

Need help to do them
Can do them without help but it causes you significant pain, distress or anxiety
Can do them without help but it could or does put yours or another person’s health and safety at risk
Can do them without help but it takes you a lot longer than others

When we consider the effect on your wellbeing, we will consider these areas:

Your personal dignity (including treating you with respect)
Your physical, mental health and emotional wellbeing
Protecting you from abuse and neglect
Your control over day-to-day life (including over support provided to you and the way it’s provided).
Your participation in work, education, training or leisure
Your social and economic wellbeing
Your domestic, family and personal life
The suitability of your living accommodation
Your contribution to society

We understand that needs can change or vary from time to time because of your health or situation. We will consider this when making decisions about whether you are eligible for support.

If you have eligible needs, we will:

work with you to plan your care and support. Your support plan will set out how you will be supported to achieve your outcomes (goals). You can read more about care and support planning here.
determine your personal budget. This is the amount of money we think is needed to meet the eligible needs identified in your assessment. Your personal budget will be made up of money from us plus any financial contribution you are assessed to pay including how your care is going to be paid for. We will talk to you about ways of receiving and using your personal budget. For example, we could pay your personal budget to you as a direct payment so you can manage your care and support yourself.
arrange a financial assessment to decide if you must make a financial contribution to your care. You can read more about a financial assessment in our Paying for Care section.

We will only help you with unmet needs. This means we generally won’t provide care for needs that are already being met from somewhere else, or by someone else, for example a family member or friend. If you are not eligible for help from us, we can give you information and advice about what help is available elsewhere. This could be from local charities or voluntary organisations.

STEP 3

After your assessment, if you have eligible care and support needs, we will estimate how much money is required to meet your eligible needs. This is called an indicative personal budget.

This is our first estimate of what we think might be needed and it might not be the same as your final personal budget amount. This will help you to understand how much it may cost to meet your needs and to look at options available at that cost to include in your support plan.

Once you have an estimated budget, we will start developing your support plan with you. You can be creative and use sources of support that work for you. We will work with you to identify your support networks and explore all available options.

Support planning is about you saying what you want your care and support to look like, and how it could help make things better for you. When everyone is happy with the content of the plan, it will be written up for your agreement.

We can’t confirm your final personal budget until we have agreed a support plan and this might differ from the estimated budget. We need to see and agree a support plan before we can release any of your personal budget. It is important that you agree with your support plan. You and the person who cares for you are involved when the support plan is drawn up. If you don’t agree or aren’t happy with the contents of your plan, please speak to your social worker first or see our Contact Us page for further information.

If you would like to consider care and support providers locally, please see our Care options page.

What will my care and support plan cover?

Your support plan will cover:

What is important to you
How you would like your situation to change
Your personal budget and how it will be used to meet your needs
When and how you will get support, and any you’re getting already
Whether you have a carer, who may have needs of their own
How you will stay safe and manage any risks
Any special needs you have, including any cultural or faith needs
Plans for what will happen if things change or in an emergency
When we will review your support

How is my care, support and personal budget reviewed?

A review is a re-assessment of your support needs. It is an opportunity for you to discuss the care and support you get and to think about what is going well and what might need to change. We will normally review your needs:

around six weeks after a new service starts (We call this a ‘light touch review’)
at least every year
if your care situation changes

You can request that we review your needs at any time if you feel that the support you have is not working, or if there is a change in your needs. You may have more, less or different needs than before.

We will contact you to arrange a suitable date and time and between us, we will decide whether the review can be over the telephone or by video call or by visiting you at home. We will ask you to think about who you else you want to invite, like family or friends involved in your care, or your advocate. During the review we will consider:

Whether you are achieving the outcomes (goals) in your support plan.
If your support needs have changed.
If there are other, better ways of meeting the outcomes in your support plan – for example, using equipment instead of staff visiting you.
Whether family, friends or neighbours are able to support you.
Whether other services can support you or you have other suggestions.
Whether any risks have changed.

After the review, we will update your support plan with you if anything is different. If your support is different, it can change how much you may need to contribute to the cost of your care.

STEP 4

If your care plan shows that you need a particular type of accommodation and certain conditions apply, you have the right to choose between different providers of that type of accommodation. The care professionals working with you will give you information about different providers for you to choose from. There should be at least one provider able to offer you that accommodation within your personal budget amount.

For more details on the right to choose and the different care options available to you, go to: Care options

STEP 5

Once your care needs have been assessed and there is a care plan to say how your needs will be met we will look at how your care is going to be paid for. You may have to pay the full costs of your care or make a contribution towards the costs of it. Some people will have their care fully funded by the Council, but most people are expected to make some contribution to the cost of their care. This is because although health care is offered for free at the time that it is accessed, social care is not. Social care is means tested.

We work out how much you need to pay towards the costs of your care by doing a financial assessment with you. When we do a financial assessment, we use the rules and guidance in the Care Act 2014 and in our Adult Social Care Charging Policy 2025-26 (Word, 117KB) .

For more details, go to: Paying for your care