Ian's story

Ian was struck down with a severe illness. He talks about his experience of self directed support and using direct payments and the Kent Card.

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Video transcript

Ian: In April 2007, 8 April which was the Easter weekend I got married to Denise. 

She was obviously my second wife and it was a beautiful day, Easter weekend. If anyone remembers that weekend it was fantastic, the weather was beautiful, a big family wedding, a big celebration.

The start of I suppose my future and our future together. 

While we were doing and organising the wedding I felt fairly rough and pretty run down but we put that down to everything that was going on with the wedding. 

A week after that I had been in hospital and wouldn’t be walking again.

I remember being taken straight into A and E (Accident and Emergency), I remember a doctor giving me a shot of morphine and putting a catheter in and that’s it. 

The next thing I remember is vaguely on May 6th there were a string of cards above my bed and I had been in a coma.

It was that that I built. Everything happened after that, so that’s the last thing I did of any sort of practical form in the house.

So mid November I was discharged from Buckland.  About a week later my care manager came around to see me and as I say he knew very little really.

He didn’t really know what was going on, he realized very quickly that we had major problems and the biggest problem was for my wife. How was she going to cope with someone in my condition? 

They looked at the whole family and the whole package and that was where we then started talking about Self Directed Support. 

The beauty of that system is that you’ve got a family life back, so you are getting back to some kind of normal routine, or as normal as you can make it.

It became fairly apparent quite early on that the Kent Card was probably going to be the way to go. It is in effect a straight forward debit card, these are corporate, there’s a telephone number you can talk to them on, so you can do telephone banking and it’s like every other account, you just manage the money that’s in that account and just record where it’s all going.

You can employ a self employed PA (Personal Assistant) which is what I do and I call her in as and when I need her and I pay for her time and any mileage or anything like that. 

I can use care companies, so I have one of the local care agencies, they have people that come in on a regular schedule to get me up and help me if I need them during the day and that sort of thing. It’s having access to very simple things that can make a huge amount of difference to the way you live your life.