How long does an assessment take?

When you contact us with a simple enquiry or an urgent request, we'll try to help you straight away, but if your situation or your question is more complicated, we may need to take some details and phone you back.

Assessment

During the working week, if your safety and welfare is in danger; your life is threatened or your caring situation will collapse without a quick solution, we'll start our assessment within four hours, so that we arrange support for you as quickly as possible.

During the evenings, at weekends and bank holidays our Emergency Duty Team can arrange temporary support if needed.

We'll start all assessments within 48 hours. Some assessments can be complicated and involve talking to you a number of times and talking to other people - so it can take up to 28 days to complete.

Arranging services

In all situations where we provide you with a service we will give you a statement of your needs and how these needs will be met - this is called a Care Plan.

We will then arrange services as quickly as possible and most services within four weeks from finishing the assessment. We will be able to arrange some services more quickly although some do take longer:

• We will deliver equipment within seven working days (except bespoke items).
• We will complete low cost adaptations to your home within six weeks.
• We will complete major adaptations to your home within 35 weeks.
• We will offer you a suitable new home instead of a major adaptation within six months and we'll review it every six months.

If you need an electrically powered wheelchair, we'll complete our assessments within ten weeks. Once you have been assessed, you should be able to take your wheelchair away with you. If the wheelchair needs to be ordered specially for you then you should receive it within six weeks (subject to manufacturers' delivery times).

This page was last updated on 7 September 2011