Freedom Providers
Powered by Yorkshire in Business - funded by East Riding of Yorkshire Council
Freedom Providers works with individuals to set up as Micro providers. Micro providers are small businesses that operate typically with less than 5 employees providing costed services to residents. These services are, but not limited to Home Maintenance, Cleaning, Gardening, Companionship, Dog Walking, Shopping, Meal Preparation and Personal Care.
The micro providers offer costed services to residents who are elderly (over 60yrs) and/or vulnerable adults including those with Learning Disabilities (LD) and Serious Mental Illness (SMI) in their own homes delaying the need for residential care.
Our offer
To help plug the current gap in services, the Freedom Providers project gives training & self-employment opportunities to those that want to set up as a micro provider as well as provide care and support to East Riding residents in their own homes.
The support provided is initially non-regulated, and the project will support & ensure the providers are appropriately set up to provide these services, by meeting the Quality Standards required.
The project supports the development of micro providers by providing specialist care advice with mentoring, training, business advice, & peer support.
- We provide a Single Point of Contact for requests from people & professionals seeking to set up as a micro provider.
- We provide specialist care training, advice, mentoring and business support to ensure & monitor that micro providers are set up & are operating correctly, have appropriate insurances and adhere to CQC regulations and other legislation and requirements
- Market and promote the scheme to East Riding residents, organisations & professionals
Future support
- Provide bimonthly networking meetings to support micro providers and offer peer support
- Ongoing training and business support
- Access to regular work opportunities
Our impact
The emphasis of the council’s Health and Wellbeing Strategy is on prevention and resilience for good health, which for older adults includes to:
Support creation of ‘active communities’ to help reduce, prevent and delay the need for services, improving the healthy happy years of life.
Reducing social isolation, particularly for those groups identified as most vulnerable.
In 2021 local authorities received over 1.9m requests for support from 1.3m new clients. In total 841,000 people were receiving state funded long term care in 2020- 21. Demand will continue to grow because of better diagnosis, higher survival rates, longer life expectancies, health inequalities, obesity and the increase cost of living.
It has been identified that there is unmet need in providing home care and day services particularly in rural and coastal geographies.
While many older people require regulated care from a CQC registered carer, many residents require support with domiciliary needs, such as shopping, cleaning, cooking, transport, access to social activity, dog walking.
The pressure on care services is huge at a time where there is increased demand from vulnerable people with a substantial growth of older people living in and moving to the East Riding.
East Riding of Yorkshire Council had a vision to provide an agile response to meet the needs of local people who require support in their own homes by growing and supporting micro care providers who are skilled, trained & qualified to provide the help needed.
In the first year of Freedom Providers project, we created 45 Approved Providers supplying over 2500 support hours
How do I refer or find out more?
Contact Suzanne Sellers – Project Development Manager
Suzanne has many years of management experience working in the Health & Social Care Sector and especially understands the issues facing people living in rural parts of the county.
Website: www.freedomproviders.co.uk
Telephone: 01262 213155
E-mail: [email protected]
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