Voluntary Action Shetland (360G-SCVO-a0g0N00002FvdEPQAZ)

We are looking to get carers more involved in the planning of services, specifically short breaks. We have had difficulty in the past in getting the carers engaged but at the moment, one of the council local services has been engaging with their carers about the respite service that they are offered. This group are interested in working with us and we would like to bring them together but expand the group to cover those that aren't within the current scope for the local authority review, for example including carers of people who are in children's services, as these will be future users and also those caring for adults who do not have a learning disability. Within the local authority review they have looked at some options but we would like them to go further, to do this we need to inspire carers to look at ways of doing tings differently, much of the current project has worked on making changes to the staff attitudes. From some of the information already gathered there are ideas that the service will be able to change but the project is very much local authority led. We hope that by opening up the group to a wider group of carers and us being able to contribute by using our budget to explore other options we will truly be able to offer carers choice in how they receive their shortbreak. Some of these ideas will need to be tried and tested by carers before other people will be willing to put them into practice. For example this may involve bringing up speakers to give new ideas for example some of the campaigns that are being run South such as "Stay up Late", "Shared Lives" or "Gig Buddies" We would like to create a few opportunities for carers to come together where we will facilitate how things can be done differently to give people new ideas for different ways of achieving their short break. We would develop a short action plan from this which would have money available to overcome hurdles that may be put up by the local authority. We will need to work closely with the local authority to make any changes but we have already identified that some staff are open to doing things differently so we will involve these people at all stages to ensure we are working from within too. We will measure the change by providing case studies of where a new idea has been tested to show how things can be done differently. We will organise an end event to promote to all carers "Real life changes in their community in achieving a shortbreak" and also put them on our website. We hope the impact will be more choice for carers and that to achieve a shortbreak it does not have to be in the traditional way that has always been offered. The process will be to inspire the carers of how things can be done differently, follow some sort of support planning to help them come up with the ideas that would suit their personal circumstances and then test the change. So this should work that we would look for 2-3 people to come up and speak, examples of this may be Shared Lives, Gig Buddies, Stay up Late, Altogether Travel – these give people ideas about how things could be different for a shortbreak. We then work with a trainer / organisation to do support planning with families We then give each of the families a budget of up to £600 to try something that hasn’t been done before. The process will be to inspire the carers of how things can be done differently, follow some sort of support planning to help them come up with the ideas that would suit their personal circumstances and then test the change. So this should work that we would look for 2-3 people to come up and speak, examples of this may be Shared Lives, Gig Buddies, Stay up Late, Altogether Travel – these give people ideas about how things could be different for a shortbreak. We then work with a trainer / organisation to do support planning with families We then give each of the families a budget of up to £600 to try something that hasn’t been done before.