Care & Repair Leeds is the Home Improvement Agency for Leeds and has over 33 years experience of delivering services to support home independence. We have charitable status and support older people, disabled people and people living with health conditions that may be exacerbated by their home environment, such as living in cold, damp conditions.
We are commissioned by Leeds City Council and Leeds CCG to provide our Home Plus Leeds service, delivered in partnership with Groundwork and Age UK Leeds. This service assists people who maybe at serious risk of falling, who are struggling to heat their home or to pay heating bills, who need help with repairs that are causing a hazard in their home, who need information and advice to maintain independence, or who need small adaptations to their home to enable a safe discharge from hospital. In the first two years of Home Plus, we assisted over 10,000 people.
We also have a Technical service which supports people who need larger adaptations to their home, ranging from ramps and wet floor showers, up to large extensions providing ground floor bathing and bedroom facilities. We have a Memorandum of Understanding with Leeds City Council to assist them with large scale disabled adaptations to their Council stock.
Our services help people to lead safe, fulfilling lives, and at the same time, stay out of hospital and institutional care. The people we have assisted report through our Client Feedback surveys that they feel safer and more independent at home, have an improved sense of well-being and, for some, have increased their income through the help they have received in applying for eligible benefits.
Our customer satisfaction in 2019/20 was 99.13%, an excellent achievement, and credit to the staff and contractors, who are committed to providing a high quality, person-centred service.
We work with statutory and voluntary sector partners to identify people who need our services, and receive referrals from a range of organisations as well as from the individual or their families/carers. Our Support Workers visit people in their own homes to carry out a full holistic assessment of the individual's needs, referring on to other organisations if we are unable to support with some of their needs.
We deliver presentations and attend awareness raising events to market and promote our services. We actively engage with other organisations in order to achieve greater levels of collaboration and in 2018 partnered with four other city-wide charities to set up the Leeds Oak Alliance. After a successful funding bid, the Alliance has set up a pilot Third Sector Hub project based in St James University Hospital, working together to provide advice, information and support for people who are frail and / or receiving end of life care, and their carers.
We are in the process of developing a marketing strategy with particular focus on promoting our technical service to people who need adaptations to their home to improve their quality of life, who can self-fund but need a trusted organisation to manage the works and 'take the worry out of making changes to their home'. We are always exploring opportunities to secure additional funding to continue and expand the services we deliver to assist people.