The Adult Front Door provides information, advice and guidance. An Adult Front Door advisor will help the person get the right information for their specific needs and can signpost them to relevant external services or organisations if required.

If it is felt that the person likely to have ongoing care and support needs might need more specialist input, then the Adult Front Door Team will make an internal referral. The referrals will go to the most appropriate social work team, the Safeguarding team, Hospital and Reablement, the Young Adults Team or Mental Health professionals.

These are some of the teams in adult social care that you may be referred to on your journey:

• Social Work Teams:
  • Area social work
  • Learning disabilities social work
  • Mental health social work
• Safeguarding
• Hospital or reablement
• Young Adult Team preparation for adulthood
• Approved Mental Health Professionals

Get in contact with adult social care through our Adult Front Door.

Once a person has been allocated to the right service, a practitioner will be allocated to do an initial assessment of your support needs and find out more about you and what support will help you.

During an assessment, we collect information and ask questions so we can better understand what support is needed.

We ensure that the person feels listened to, and work with them to ensure their eligible care and support needs are met.

This stage is to develop the care and support plan for receiving care and support.

At this point, things like financial assessments, and if a direct payment has been identified as the method to meet someone’s eligible care and support needs.

Financial assessment

In Worcestershire, social care and support services are usually paid for either:

• privately by you or your family
• by the local authority (Worcestershire County Council) when you're eligible for support

If you are eligible to receive adult social care support on a long-term basis, we will talk to you some more, to complete a financial assessment to work out how much, if anything, you will have to contribute towards the cost of care yourself.

This will determine whether, and how much, you would be asked to pay towards the costs of your care. 

If you are assessed as needing to pay the full costs of your care, you can make arrangements for yourself. 

Find out more about paying for care

We will ensure the provision of services or allocation of funds to enable you to purchase your own care and support, such as personal budgets or direct payments.

An initial review is carried out after 6 weeks from the start of care and support plan. Your allocated practitioner will check back with you to see how things are going and whether the support provided is meeting your needs.

Any changes can be made at this time.

The reviews ensure that the level of care is appropriate and that the person is being supported effectively

The customer journey through Adult Social Care can end with an annual review after 12 months, further information and advice, signposting to other services and resources, continuation of support with a subsequent 12-month review, or the closing of the case.

• if you no longer require ongoing can support, you will be provided advice about how to contact us again should this change
• if you just require additional advice and information about accessing services not provided by the local authority this will be provided you also
• should you continue to require ongoing care and support from the local authority, we will ensure that you receive an annual review of your account support arrangements