How Self-directed support works, Feeling conspicuous in meetings

Available for over a year

Listener Yvonne Holt contacted In Touch to pose a question about her self-directed support. Yvonne is in receipt of an individual budget which allows her to employ a personal assistant for a number of hours a week. Apart from this support, Yvonne also could use her individual budget to fund some specialist equipment. However, one piece of equipment she requested to be included in her budget was rejected. We speak to Yvonne about this arrangement and we hear from Stephen Payne, Community Services Manager for Vista, a voluntary blindness charity based in Leicester, about how individual budgets work, who gets them and how decisions are made about what kinds of support get funded. Regular contributor to In Touch Tom Walker has recently returned from a trip to Argentina. Tom has so far chalked up visits to 28 countries, the majority of which he has visited travelling solo. We speak to Tom about his recent adventure and get a flavour of how he operates when he's travelling alone. Priya Commander wrote to In Touch about how difficult she finds attending meetings when she is the only visually impaired person there. She shares her thought-provoking column and explores why she thinks sighted people find it so difficult to interact with her, as a blind person, at meetings.