Adult Social Care Glossary, v 0.6

Formerly ‘Informal Carer involvement in Assessment’ and ‘Method of Assessment or Review’ in previous versions of the specification.

Method of Assessment describes who was actively involved in the assessment. To be actively involved, the person’s views must have been considered as part of the assessment.

The Care Act 2014 requires local authorities to assess adults’ needs for care and support and carers’ needs for support. Where local authorities carry out an adult’s assessment with their carer involved, or a carer’s assessment with the cared-for person involved, the Method of Assessment should be ‘Service user and carer’.

This field will be used to identify whether carers have been actively involved in an assessment, either together with the adult they care for or alone. This is currently reported in SALT LTS003 Table 3.

Local authorities will have different ways of carrying out and recording assessments. The level of service user and carer involvement will vary, case by case and between authorities. Local authority social care data leads should use their professional judgement when extracting information from local systems to best describe who has been actively involved in the assessment.

• Carer only
• Service user only
• Service user and carer

Data type: Defined list