Care Confidence – an online care planning tool to support self-funders
What does it mean to feel confident about care decisions? Knowing you have reliable information and have explored your options can help you feel comfortable with your next move.
Many older people who need to get to grips with social care do not feel confident about how to do it. Social care is a sprawling, complicated system with different entitlements, processes and roles. It’s hard enough to navigate in the best circumstances, but by the time people start to look into social care they may already have care needs, and this can be one of the most difficult times of their life.
Navigating care is particularly tricky for people who don’t get government support to pay for care. Everyone using social care is entitled to information and advice from their local authority, but research shows that people who don’t qualify for local authority funding towards social care can feel unsupported when it comes to making decisions:
“I think when you’re self-funding…you’re a little bit left on your own basically to, to navigate your own way through and, you know, make the decisions, there’s no sort of person there saying, “well yes, you’ve got to fund it but this would be a good route to take”, or “that would be an ideal way to go”.”
(Carer in the DeterMIND study talking about navigating social care)
Image Credit: Centre for Ageing Better Age Positive Image Library
Care Confidence was developed to provide the trusted source of information that people need in these circumstances. It breaks down the choices and sets out options for how to fund your social care. Care Confidence helps you to be better prepared to make decisions about paying for social care, whether for yourself or someone else. Crucially, it was developed with people who know what it feels like to self-fund care. It provides the confidence to make decisions you are comfortable with.
Care Confidence is freely available to use now and on 16 May in York we will be celebrating this and launching the next phase of research, Care Confidence in Action, designed to support its use.
We want to get the word out far and wide. We also want to make sure that everyone who needs to can access and use Care Confidence. We know from years of research that people can face barriers to getting, understanding and acting on information about care options. They may need more input, someone to advise them or extra reassurance.
Over the coming months, we will be working with local authorities, community providers, practitioners and members of the public to find ways to ensure Care Confidence can help as many people as possible.
We will keep you posted about how things go. In the meantime, please share Care Confidence with anyone who needs a helping hand.
For more information contact lyndsay.lindley@york.ac.uk