A highly skilled and knowledgeable team of Family Carer Practitioners deliver one-to-one support in the community and carry out Carer’s Assessments.

You can refer yourself for a Carer’s Assessment via the Carers Matter Norfolk Advice Line. A Family Carer Practitioner will meet with you one-to-one and complete Part B of the Carer’s Assessment with you, which will include creating an Action Plan helping you to focus on what you want to achieve and the steps you can take with a Family Carer Practitioner to reach them.

What we can offer

Family Carer Practitioners will offer:

  • Carer’s Assessments – tailored support and action planning to help you maintain your health and wellbeing and independence;
  • Support Planning e.g. working with you to increase your local support networks;
  • Support to access entitlements or grants;
  • Information & Advice (greater detail and complexity than the Advice Line);

We will help you gain the skills to self-advocate (speaking up and representing yourself) where possible or refer you into specialist services where appropriate if you like someone else to represent you.

Based in the Early Help Hubs or Adult Social Services offices, Family Carer Practitioners work closely with multiple agencies, including:

  • Early Help Family Focus and Assessment Social Work teams in Children’s Services;
  • Adult Social Services;
  • Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (Mental Health);
  • Norfolk Police;
  • Housing and Benefits teams in District Councils;
  • Environmental Health;

Working together with partners in the hubs enables us to more easily find solutions to help achieve what matters to you.  Our Family Carer Practitioners are also able to access food parcels from food banks for carers where there is an urgent need.

If you’re referred by the Advice Line into Community Support, a Family Carer Practitioner will make contact and arrange to visit you at home, a local café or other community venue of your choice.

What will happen

We will complete a Part B of the Carer’s Assessment with you during our first two visits. This will include completing a Carers Outcomes Star as part of the Carer’s Assessment process. It helps both you and the Family Carer Practitioner to assess your quality of life using the Star Scales (across the seven areas that carers said was important to them) and what support is needed to help continue caring with confidence, whilst looking after your wellbeing. The Carers Star provides a visual way of showing you how you feel, the areas which work well and those where you feel improvement is needed.

The seven areas of the Carer’s Star we will look at with you are:

  • Health
  • The Caring Role
  • Managing at Home
  • Time for yourself
  • How you feel
  • Finances
  • Work

The Family Carer Practitioner will then work with you to create an action plan, which will help you focus on your goals and define the steps required to reach them.

There are several different kinds of support the Family Carer Practitioner can offer you as they support you to achieve the goals in your action plan:

  • Peer to peer support groups
  • Counselling
  • Use of the Health and Wellbeing Fund to purchase services or items that will help you with your goals
  • Carers Breaks

Your Family Carer Practitioner will review your Carers Star with you at the end of their time working with you.  This helps us both track the progress you’ve made and the difference our agreed actions have made in supporting you achieve better wellbeing.  We will keep contact with you over the next few months to check how you are doing with your caring journey and then complete a final Carers Star with you.