The White Paper, “Our health, our care, our say”, sets out our proposals for giving people more choice and control over the type of support and help they want and when they want it. We are taking a number of steps to increase the uptake of direct payments and are piloting individual budgets which we hope will place even greater control in the hands of individuals, opening up the range and availability of services to match needs.
However, we also recognise that there may be occasions when the need for respite care cannot be easily anticipated. We also made a commitment in the White Paper to ensure that provision of short term home based respite care for carers in emergency and crisis conditions is available in each council area. We are currently scoping out the details of this work.