Frequently Asked Questions

We hope we can offer you the support to achieve the outcomes that you choose for yourself. Some people pay for services themselves, some have a personal budget, and others are supported through Adult Social Service to access services.

If you do have a personal budget, or wish to pay privately for your service, then please call us on our central number 0300 790 0508 or ring your local service.

We will invite you to meet team members and come and look around our hubs to see the service and activities on offer, and talk through what you want from our service. The same applies if your service is being sourced with the help of a Social Worker. You are most welcome to visit and your social worker will arrange this with our services, for you.

Yes of course, we would love to welcome you to come along to services, meet the team, see what is on offer and maybe have a taster session. At the moment we need to do all we can to make sure our services are Covid secure, so the ability to visit is limited and we have to manage the risk of this. We may offer you a Zoom meeting to discuss your needs and perhaps have a video tour of services of interest to you. We are open and we just want to make visits safe for everyone.

Our team colleagues undergo a high level of mandatory and specialist training before they start work with customers. We recruit to values, which means we are always looking for people with a passion and excitement for supporting people to live the lives they choose. This is kept up to date through regular updates delivered by our in-house Learning and Development Team as well as external providers. Our teams will also have specific training where it is necessary for specific customers. We do this in order to meet your needs and have long experience in supporting complex needs for a wide range of customers and their families. Many of our team members have been with us for over 20 years and are skilled and experienced with our customer groups.

Yes, we hold a range of registrations with the Care Quality Commission who inspect and report on our services. You can find the latest reports on our services on our CQC Service Ratings page.

We understand the importance of consistency in your support colleagues. Whilst we can’t promise this, we definitely will do all we can to make sure you have faces that you recognise and a core team around you who understand you well and will work with you to achieve your goals. What we can promise is that our colleagues will be given the very best training, development and support to make sure they are in the best position to support your needs.

We provide a range of services; some building based and some delivered in the community. You could be attending a community hub for a day service where you will be able to choose from a wide range of activities on offer. These might be employment focused if this is your goal, or you may be receiving complex care in one of building-based services.

Support in the community can be delivered in to or out of your home and is designed to support your independence goals and will support you to access your local community. This is a very bespoke service and may be delivered on a 1:1 or 2:1 basis through Personal Assistants. Either way, there is lots of opportunity for social interaction and learning with others.

Currently, due to Covid-19, we are working in small social bubbles so all activity will take place with the same small numbers of people and staff.

We will work with the school your son or daughter is attending to ensure the transition to adult services is seamless and easy. We offer a wide range of learning modules through our Gateway Assured Learning Programme with the opportunity to learn skills for work, horticulture, independence, customer service, brewing, baking and community safety. We learn through doing and so all of the programmes are activity based. Our skilled teams of colleagues also offer a full range of support for complex care needs and we have recently invested in new equipment and a range of technical kit to support communication, learning, interaction and fun.

Personal care is available for any daily task you may need support with. This might include bathing, showering, looking after your skin with creams and lotions, dressing and support with going to the toilet. We are also able to support with more clinical interventions such as PEG feeding and maintaining a stoma or catheter bag.

We will work to your regular routines which we know are important to you and ensure the support is specific to your requirements. Our fully trained support colleagues will provide discrete, professional and dignified personal care in a way that is comfortable for you. We will do our best to ensure you see familiar faces when it comes to personal care.

When it comes to a professional and dignified home care service we recommend the services of our sister company, Home Support Matters. They are well regarded in the field of delivering home support with highly skilled teams working across Norfolk and the Waveney Valley area of Suffolk.  Whether you need low levels of personal care, help to remain independent or high levels of clinical care, Home Support Matters can help you offering everything from short visits to live in care.

Contact Home Support Matters here

We are so fortunate to have our work supported by so many wonderful volunteers. Volunteers bring skills, energy and a passion for the life chances of our customers and could be involved in a vast range of activity from brewing beer to helping customers in our gardens or supporting the development of work skills in our cafes and bakery.

Volunteering with Independence Matters not only ensures our customers are supported really well but is a vastly rewarding experience for those who join us gaining valuable experience in the world of supporting people with a learning disability or living with dementia.