Home care is specialised and bespoke medical and/or social care that is carried out in your home, to fit around your daily life. Home care can include everything from helping you carry out your daily errands to attending social events or administering medication and medical care. Being bespoke by design, home care can be tailored to each client individually to ensure the service users unique requirements and needs are being met.
But home care can also be a costly affair, with the average price falling around £15 per hour. Most people who require home care also aren’t in employment, so there are funding options available for those who require help funding their home care. There are three ways to fund the care and seek financial support to help pay for home care:
Local Authority Funding
Local authority funding is where your local council will help fund all or part of the home care, depending on the results of a means test or needs assessment. In England and Wales, there is an upper cap to how much you are allowed to have in savings while being eligible for home care funding.
The current thresholds for 2021/22 are below, so if you have more in savings and assets than these figures, you won’t be eligible for local authority funding:
- England: £23,250
- Wales: £24,000
- There is no means test for personal care at home in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
NHS Funding
In certain circumstances, the NHS will help fund all or part of the costs of home care, where the care will include a medical component. The NHS Continuing Healthcare fund is just for this: for patients that require ongoing medical care outside of hospital, especially if they have complex needs such as a physical or developmental disability, or a serious physical injury. After a stay in hospital, you may be eligible for NHS Intermediate Care, which will fund up to six weeks of home care after your hospital stay.
Self-Funding
If there is no NHS or local authority funding available to you, then you will need to self-fund your home care. Self-funding is where the person requiring care (or their friends or relatives) pay for the full amount of the homecare services privately. Self-funding can be done through a variety of methods, from savings to benefits or pension income, or downsizing to a smaller property.
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