Developing Shared Lives holidays and breaks

Shared Lives Carers

 

We are really pleased that we have been awarded Department of Health funding to develop a way of offering Shared Lives as holidays and breaks to people across local authority boundaries, in different areas of the country. There are Shared Lives carers who can provide short breaks living in seaside towns, national parks and in the heart of large cities.

Others may live in areas which someone would like to visit because they have family there. The new scheme will mean that people will be able to look at an online catalogue to find out whether there is an approved Shared Lives carer in the area in which they would like to take a break or holiday. We will develop ways of Shared Lives schemes working together to ensure that the right matching and safeguarding processes are carried out before the break. These holidays will be a much cheaper and more homely alternative to visiting an expensive residential facility and we expect that some people will want to return to visit the same family year after year.

We are recruiting for a twelve-month project development worker to work with Shared Lives carers and schemes to develop matching, safeguarding, inter-scheme working and payment policies to enable safe and affordable Shared Lives arrangements to take place across county boundaries.

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