Family Carers Managing Personal Budgets v1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Exploring carers’ experiences of managing personal budgets for people with complex needs.
IRAS ID
248000
Contact name
Julie Beadle-Brown
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Kent
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 7 months, 31 days
Research summary
Families play an important role in supporting people with disabilities to manage their personal budgets. There a number of positive outcomes for family carers managing personal budgets; however, a key theme emerging from the literature is a lack of support for carers to manage the personal budget. More importantly, research in this area has primarily focused on families supporting older adults and those supporting people with mental health problems.
This research aims to address the gap in the literature related to the experiences of family carers managing personal budgets for people with intellectual disabilities or autism with moderate to high levels of support needs.
The project will explore why families decide to manage personal budgets, the information and support available to them, their relationship with the local authority/CCG, and the process of planning and managing support. We are also interested in arrangements to manage relatively smaller personal budgets (e.g. pooling resources). The study will explore the outcomes that families set out to achieve for their family member at the planning stage and how they are monitored in the delivery phase (including what happens if services are not delivering the desired outcomes).
In addition to the perspectives of family carers, we also intend to gather the views of commissioners of adult services on the advantages and challenges of personal budgets for this group of people, their experience of working with families and their reflections on the findings from the family carer interviews (presented in anonymised form).
The research is funded by the Department of Health and is being undertaken by the QORU research unit at the University of Kent. The team includes researchers from the Tizard Centre and the Personal Social Services Research Unit who have expertise in research with carers, people with autism and learning disabilities and community care.REC name
Social Care REC
REC reference
18/IEC08/0025
Date of REC Opinion
17 Jul 2018
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion