Caring for carers

Your support needs will change over time and will depend on factors such as your level of experience and confidence, the particular needs of the child in your care and the intensity of the care tasks required of you, for example if the child in your care has complex or extreme support needs.

Child Safety and your foster and kinship care agency are committed to providing you with a broad range of quality supports including:

1. Financial and practical supports are available to you through either Child Safety or your care service. Child Safety provides a number of carer allowances and reimbursements of child related costs, as well as your automatic entitlement to a Carer Business Discount Card.
   
   Your support agency may also provide some financial and practical supports and will provide you with specific information on request. Read more about the financial support available to foster and kinship carers.
   
   
2. Training and development opportunities are accessible through the Quality Care: Foster Care Training package, as well as a wide-range of additional topic-specific training modules. These provide for flexible delivery, including training in small groups, self-paced online learning, and one-to-one delivery. Ask your care service support worker for a copy of the regional training calendar.
   
   Your learning and development activities are a wider concept than just attending a training course. It can include reading material on the internet and other topic-specific information to deepen your knowledge. Your foster and kinship care agency will work with you to develop a learning plan specifically for your learning needs. For foster carers, this will be documented in your Foster Carer Agreement, and for kinship carers in the Placement Agreement for the child.
   
   
3. Respite can provide you with time out from the caring role and can help to maintain the care arrangement. Respite can provide both you and the child in care with planned breaks on a once-off or regular basis. Respite can be for any duration such as a few hours, a day, a night, weekend or for part of the school holidays. Respite might include:
   
   
   • the child returning home for family contact
   • staying with school friends
   • vacation care
   • babysitting arrangements
   • recreational camps.
   
   It can also include the provision of temporary short-term care of the child with another approved carer. Child Safety may also approve concurrent payment (Dual Respite) of carer allowances to both the primary carer and the respite carer. This will need to be discussed in a placement meeting or by contacting the child’s Child Safety Officer (CSO) if emergent circumstances arise. The dual payment of carer allowances requires the approval of the child safety service centre Manager.
   
   
4. Regular formal support is provided to every carer. Care service support staff are a key source of support and will develop a support plan with you, outlining the frequency and purpose of their contact. This will include home visits and phone support. They will talk with you about your role as a carer and assist you to reflect on your role, such as what went well, what did not go so well and what you might do differently in the future.
   
   The child’s CSO will also have a minimum of monthly contact with the child and is focused on support that is specific to meeting the particular needs of the child in your care and the case plan actions.
   
   
5. Crisis support is available through Child Safety’s foster and kinship care support line, and after hours care service. You may also be able to access on-call support from your foster and kinship care service.