14 June 2012
During a routine inspection
"They are both very good, I get on well with them" was how one of the people we spoke with put it when talking about their shared lives carers.
In recent comments recorded from questionnaires returned in March 2012, one person noted; "I feel more independent now that I live with (my shared lives carers) everything is good".
The people we spoke with who had been placed with shared lives carers told us that they felt safe and that they felt reasonably free to determine what they did when. They told us that they were able to independently access the community.
They said that they had been involved in their own assessment process and that they had been able to understand what the process of assessment and placement was. In one case a placement had not been meeting their needs in the way they wanted it to. They said that they had been fully involved in the process of changing their placement to one that better met their needs.
One person told us that the day we spoke with them they had been involved in the recruitment and assessment process for potential new shared lives carers. This showed that the recruitment process included participation by people with first-hand experience of what it was like to be placed with a shared lives carer.
When we looked at records of care we saw a number of comments recorded by people placed with shared lives carers in answer to quality questionnaires. These were all positive and no concerns were raised in the responses we saw. Two people told us that they were given the chance to make comments about their experience.