Respite care for children with disabilities

Why do children and young people with disabilities need respite care?

• Children or young people with a disability may require extra support due to their autism, cerebral palsy, sensory loss, learning difficulties, a physical impairment or medical condition. In addition they have the same needs and individual personalities as any other children.

What are the benefits for both the child and their parents?

• Parents of children with a disability often provide intensive caring around the clock and get far less time than other parents to deal with aspects of everyday life. This means that they need regular breaks, so that they can get some chores done, spend more time with other members of the family who have missed out on individual attention, or simply have a holiday away from the usual routine.

Respite care:

• allows the children to meet new people and experience different activities.
• can make a major difference to the child's overall situation, even sometimes keeping them from being placed in residential care or long-term fostering, rather than remaining with their families.
• provides much valued support for parents or long-term carers of children with disabilities.

What is involved?

To become respite foster carers and provide this vital service you:

• need to be caring with regular amounts of spare time and enthusiasm to share.
• will work as part of a team of people involved in providing care and support for a disabled child and their family.
• will need to be willing to be trained to undertake specific care tasks in relation to medication, mealtimes and personal care.
• can continue to work on a full or part-time basis and still make a great difference to the life of a child and their family.
• The Foster Care Respite Scheme for Children with Disabilities provides an option to offer care to a number of children as a full-time career.

Can you help?

• You need a spare bedroom to provide respite care but your home does not need to be accessible to wheelchair users. In some exceptional circumstances consideration will be given to adaptations.
• It is particularly helpful if you have a ground floor bedroom and bathroom facilities.

This is such an important service for the families concerned - yet we always have waiting lists of people needing respite, because demand regularly outstrips supply. If you have the qualities needed and are interested in joining this crucial pool of respite foster carers, please contact us on 0845 330 2968 and an Adviser will be happy to answer your enquiries.

Other types of foster care:

• Short-term foster care
• Long-term foster care
• Day foster care
• Special needs foster care
• Respite foster care
• Parent and child foster care
• Concurrency
• 16Plus
• Specialist schemes