If you are getting care in your home, you might find it useful to get the new NHS guidance on 'continuing healthcare'. This is the funding system for paying for homecare if you don't need to be in hospital. It's more generous and flexible that community care funding from local authorities, but you can only get it if you need healthcare (so you get this free from the NHS), as opposed to help with the activities of daily living (which you have to contribute to and get from the local authority social services). It's a stupid division of responsibilities, which comes from the fact that healthcare is legally free from the NHS, but if you don't need the health element, they don't have to pay. The social services principle is that you should be responsible for your own everyday living needs, so you do have to pay for services to help you with that.
Anyway, there's a complicated assessment process, usually done by nurses from your local health services, which is described in the 'National Framework'. A new edition has just been published, so if you want the lowdown on what they're supposed to be doing, here it is. If you want to dispute what they're saying this is a useful guideline.
Link to the new National Framework.
If you're used to dealing with the old national framework document, you might find a newsletter from the lawyers Mills and Reeve useful. The new document has some changes in practice, and the order of the old document has been mucked around. This newsletter tells you about the changes and has a table setting out where you can find the main topics in the old and new documents.
Link to the Mills and Reeve legal newsletter.
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