Home Care in Lambeth, from Waterloo to West Norwood

Yes, we provide visiting home care in Lambeth. Our carers come in for personal care, medication support, meals and company, starting with a free home assessment and a written care plan. We cover the whole borough, but our office is in Lewisham, so how easily we can staff regular visits depends on where in Lambeth you live, and we will tell you plainly at the first call.

From Waterloo to Streatham: how far we travel

Lambeth is a long, thin borough. It starts at the river by Waterloo and St Thomas' Hospital and runs south for several miles to the Norwood ridge near Crystal Palace. It does not border Lewisham; Southwark sits in between. For our carers, the two ends of Lambeth are very different journeys.

• Waterloo, Kennington and Vauxhall are the easiest to reach. Southeastern trains run from Lewisham to Waterloo East, and the Northern and Victoria lines do the rest. Allow roughly 20 to 35 minutes.
• Brixton, Stockwell, Herne Hill and Tulse Hill are roughly 35 to 50 minutes away by train or bus.
• Clapham, Streatham and West Norwood take about 45 minutes to an hour. Streatham and West Norwood have no Tube station, only Southern and Thameslink trains.

Visiting care is realistic across much of the borough, subject to which carers are free. Four short visits a day are a lot of journeys, though, and in Streatham and the south-west a live-in carer is usually the more dependable arrangement. We do not have an office or a team based in Lambeth, and we will not pretend otherwise.

What a visiting carer does in a Lambeth home

Visits are built around the parts of the day that have become hard: getting washed and dressed, a hot lunch, the evening medication, getting safely into bed.

• Personal care
• Medication support
• Home help
• Companionship
• Sit-in service
• Dementia care

Lambeth is overwhelmingly a borough of flats, and that shapes the care. In Brixton, Stockwell, Kennington and Herne Hill, many older people live in the upper half of a Victorian or Georgian house, up a narrow staircase with no lift. That makes a stairlift or a hoist hard to fit, and a bath on the first floor is often the first thing that stops being safe. On the big estates, such as Loughborough, Angell Town, Stockwell Park or Cotton Gardens in Kennington, everything depends on the lift working. Along Streatham High Road and Streatham Hill the mansion blocks usually have lifts but small bathrooms. We check all of this at the assessment.

How do I get a care assessment from Lambeth Council?

If you may want the council to pay towards care, ask Lambeth Adult Social Care for a needs assessment. You can do it two ways:

• Fill in the council's adult social care referral form online.
• Phone the Lambeth Service Centre on 020 7926 5555, choose Adults, then Option 1 if the person has no current support, or Option 2 if they already have a service (this goes to the Community Duty Team).

Have their name, address and date of birth ready, and get their agreement first where you can. A GP or the hospital can also refer. The council's Connected Lambeth eligibility checker gives a rough early idea of whether someone is likely to qualify. If they do, a financial assessment follows, and the council's support can be taken as a direct payment and used to pay an agency such as ours. Lambeth refers people to Blue Sky Brokers (0333 034 1101) for help setting a direct payment up. You can also pay us privately with no council involvement at all; we give a written quote after the assessment.

Coming home from St Thomas' or King's

Where a Lambeth resident goes into hospital depends mostly on which end of the borough they live in. North Lambeth, including Waterloo, Kennington, Vauxhall and much of Stockwell and Clapham, is served by St Thomas' Hospital on Westminster Bridge Road. Brixton, Herne Hill, Tulse Hill and much of the middle and south are closer to King's College Hospital at Denmark Hill, just over the border in Southwark. People at the far southern edge are sometimes taken to St George's in Tooting or Croydon University Hospital. Whichever hospital it is, the care at home afterwards is still arranged through Lambeth Adult Social Care.

Call us while the discharge is still being planned, not on the day. That gives us time to check whether we can staff the visits at the times needed, or whether a live-in carer would cover it better. More on how this works: hospital discharge support.

Memory problems, dementia and the day centres

If you are worried about someone's memory, the GP can refer them to the Southwark and Lambeth Memory Service, run by South London and Maudsley, for assessment and diagnosis. Age UK Lambeth, on Acre Lane in Brixton, runs a dementia service with home visits and weekly Magnolia Club drop-ins at Kennington Lane, Christ Church Gipsy Hill and the Myatts Field North Centre. After a council assessment, people may also be offered a place at Clarence Avenue Day Centre in Clapham Park or Central Hill Day Services in Upper Norwood, both for people with dementia.

Lambeth's own day-centre list includes centres for older Asian, Chinese and Vietnamese residents, reflecting communities that have been here for decades, from the Windrush generation in Brixton to the Portuguese families of Stockwell and Vauxhall. If a carer who understands someone's cooking, faith or first language would make a difference, say so at the assessment, and we will tell you honestly whether we can match it.

What we can help with in Lambeth

• Personal care, washing and dressing
• Medication prompting and support
• Meals, laundry and home help
• Companionship and getting out
• Dementia care at home
• Support after a hospital stay
• Short breaks for family carers
• Live-in care when needs grow