What is this?

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Home | Accessibility | Just starting out | Templates | Staffing policies

Welcome and what is this website?

Welcome to managing your care budget.

We are freely sharing our lived experience of running our care budgets by offering a wide range of templates available for download. The templates and other resources will be of use to anyone that employs Personal Assistants (PAs) or carers. They will act as a toolkit to support you.

We are not saying that they are complex documents, it's far more than you need so many of them so quickly, and why should every single person have to write their own?

You won't need all of these documents - you might need none! Everyone is different and everyone's situation is different. You may find some of the documents essential for you, just pick and choose any that call out to you as useful.

But what do our founders say?

The following text was offered by one of the people that helped bring this wiki into being:

"This is an online peer support community platform that enables PHB users to share useful policies, documents and templates that have helped them manage their PHB for the benefit of other PHB users. This includes things like 'Health and Safety Policies', 'Staff rotas', 'employment law guidelines' and 'person-centred plans' (just to name a few!).

It also points PHB users to other helpful resources and useful websites, as well as providing an opportunity for people to answer each others questions and provide peer support. It provides a 'one-stop-shop' for those starting out with managing a PHB, as well as those who are experienced budget managers, and enables them to become better in their management role.

It prevents people having to spend hours and hours scrolling through the web to find the resources they need. Example documents can be quickly found and downloaded in a variety of formats.

All of the content is submitted by those who actually manage a PHB, and is therefore informed by those who actually know what managing a PHB is like in real life.

The website has some moderation in order to keep people feeling welcome and safe, and to prevent potentially unhelpful material being shared, however it should be appreciated that this is an opportunity for PHB users to share what has worked for them and learn together as part of a community. It is not a place to demonstrate the 'correct' way to do things and not all documents shared will be appropriate for every PHB user. Every PHB user has a unique set of needs and resources will need to be tailored to them specifically.

Any advice given on this website is the advice of that individual contributor and not of the website's management team. You should always get personalised advice from your insurer, CCG and medical team in addition to the peer support community."

Who are we?

We are a community of people who run a care budget either for ourselves, for our children, or a close relative. We are centred in England and running Personal Health Budgets (PHBs) or Personal Budgets (PBs), but most of this website is applicable to anyone managing staff in their home.

It is not a closed community. Quite the opposite, anyone in the world can offer their documents for this website.

Why is this website needed?

The quick answer is that it shouldn't be. For care budgets that do not employ paid carers, then maybe none of the documents on this website are needed. Even when carers are employed, the bare minimum is a good place to start. When a third party employs your carers then it is up to them to manage the care team. If you directly employ your carers then you will need contracts, advice on interview questions etc, but your care funding supplier should provide everything you need. Unfortunately, we have found that this is not happening in England, with Personal Health Budget recipients being abandoned to somehow create all they need with no support, worse, we have seen a few Personal Health Budget providers demanding these documents are in place.

How did this website start?

We saw the need for this website early on in a research project that was being run by the Open Lab at Newcastle University, funded by the EPSRC. Pulling all the documents together and creating this website took a lot of time, but that was mainly done as part of the research.

Who pays for the website?

Up until the middle of 2023, the research budget paid for the cost of the IT (servers, emails, domain name). After that, a new funding source has been secured for the years that follow. This website is here to stay.

What takes time though is running the website. Making sure it is up to date, keeping the spammers at bay, collecting new material.

What is a wiki?

This website is a "wiki" - exactly the same as Wikipedia. In fact, we use the same software as Wikipedia.

One of the main points about a wiki is that they are built by and maintained by a community. Anyone in the world can add to a wiki and anyone in the world can argue about what has been added! Additionally, how the wiki is governed is publicly available, so everyone can see the rules and how they are being enforced.