Community equipment and housing adaptations: draft guidance - executive summary

Assessment & Provision

To enable the delivery of person centred, outcomes focused, and streamlined service provision for all ages, it is essential that the governance, and delivery of equipment, and adaptations (for children and adults), are effectively incorporated into the integrated arrangements for health & social care partnerships.

Good assessment practice is fundamental to the provision of effective equipment and adaptations services. This should be in the context of promoting independence, and should balance risk with the need to maximise functional potential and avoid over-prescription. Equipment can complement a range of needs and interventions including rehabilitation and the management of conditions, and should be viewed as integral to the delivery of wider service objectives.

Key Actions

• Equipment, and adaptations assessment pathways, should be clearly evident in the integrated arrangements for health & social care partnerships, and relevant partners (e.g. Housing organisations, Education, Prison service…), supported by robust joint governance arrangements.
• Operational arrangements for the assessment and provision of Equipment and Adaptations, should reflect a focus on prevention, early intervention, and anticipatory care, avoiding inappropriate admission to hospital or long term care, and promoting independent living and self-management as key to improving health and wellbeing.
• Service users (children and adults), and their unpaid carers, should be fully involved in the assessment process. There is a person-centred, outcomes focus to the assessment with clear goals identified, agreed, and recorded, and the provision of the equipment recognised as a 'means to an end', rather than being 'an end in itself', with the social model of disability informing practice.
• The principal of 'minimum intervention, maximum independence' should underpin all assessments, and alternative methods of managing, should be fully explored.
• Staff should have a good understanding of the way different conditions can impact on a person's needs, and the wide range of solutions that are potentially available to support these, with the assessment pathways recognising, and helping deliver, solutions which support mental well-being, as much as physical needs.
• Services should have clear policy and processes to support service users moving from one service boundary, to another, to ensure a seamless service.