The Shared Lives initiative typically offers adults with learning disabilities a place to live in a family or house share with a carer, or to regularly visit them.
-
Sponsored feature: How Shared Lives provides care leavers with life skills
-
Feature: How to get value for money - the Milton Keynes approach
Shared Lives Plus, the membership charity for schemes in the UK, is transferring this model of support to care leavers in 16 council areas across England, Scotland and Wales over the next two years.
Birmingham, Powys, Borders Council in Scotland, Portsmouth and Newcastle are among areas offering the service to care leavers aged over 16.
Others include Oxfordshire and the London Boroughs of Hounslow, Islington and Hackney.
The scheme gives “a stable, loving base for people at a time of transition, from which they can learn skills and independence which give them life-long opportunities”, said Shared Lives Plus chief executive Ewan King.
“It’s brilliant that so many local authorities want to prioritise support for young people through Shared Lives.”
Carers are typically self employed “in a similar way to foster carers”, given training, and are “carefully matched with their guests”, said the charity.
It added that to apply carers do not need “specific qualifications, just the right values, commitment and of course, a spare bedroom”.
According to the NHS, such schemes must be registered with the Care Quality Commission and carers are “trained and vetted”. It adds that while carers are paid by such schemes this is “not by the hour”.
“Carers, as well as their families and friends, contribute a lot that is unpaid,” adds the NHS’s latest information on such schemes.
Tackling high rates of mental ill health among care leavers is a factor in transferring this model of support to young people, says Shared Lives Plus.
Currently, around 10,000 people live with or regularly visit a shared lives carer. There are around 150 schemes, which have been commissioned by councils to support adults for the last 40 years.
North East Lincolnshire Council’s director of adult social care Katie Brown called for Shared Lives “to be embedded in every area’s local offer”.
“I have seen first-hand the difference Shared Lives care makes, first through personal experience of two aunts – one of whom lived a full and active life with a Shared Lives carer, and the other who lived a quieter life in a residential care home," she said.
“The challenge and the opportunity for this programme is for local authorities to work with young people and local partners to develop services together.”
