What is SDS?
Your choice. Your support. Your way.
Self-directed Support (SDS) is the way of providing social care in Scotland that ensures individuals have choice and control over their care, support and life.
The aim of SDS is to enable individuals to live independent lives, ensuring that people who need care and support have the same freedom and choices as others. SDS promotes control through allowing individuals to organise their own care and make choices around how this would work best for them.
To be in receipt of SDS, you will have to be assessed as eligible to receive a care and support budget from your local authority. Once you have completed an assessment and are receiving a budget, you can decide how this is spent through self-directed support. You will need to make initial contact with your local authority, to find the details of the local authorities across Scotland please click here.
Under SDS, local authorities in Scotland have a legal duty to offer you different choices regarding your care. These choices are described as options and fall into four categories.
These options are known as:
Option 2 (Individual Service Fund)
Option 4 (a mix of two or more of the other options)
For more information about each of the options, click (or tap) the links above.
You can also find more information about the options, and SDS in general, on our FAQs page.