Questions about the use of technology during the Coronavirus lockdown - a help or hindrance with living independently?

During the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown, technology appears to have played an important role in helping many of us to comply with lockdown restrictions while continuing to stay in touch with each other and to access services and essential goods. In this sense, despite the resirtictions on our freedom, technology has nevertheless helped some of us to maintain a degree of control over our lives.

We want to find out from people that use a personal budget or personal health budget to access or manage their own or a family member's support and care about the new roles that technology has played during the pandemic and lockdown and whether it has helped you to maintain some degree of control over your support and your life, despite the restrictions.

For example:

• Using technology to be in contact with professionals in local councils, the NHS or service provider organisations in ways that would ordinarily be done in person.

• Using technology to be in contact with other personal budget/personal health budget holders to better understand your rights or to share practical tips and solutions.

• Using a personal budget or personal health budget to buy new technologies either to access existing support or to meet a person's assessed needs in new was.

• Using technology to access services and support already paid for using a personal budget or personal health budget that normally takes place face to face.

This is so that we can learn from the use of technology during the pandemic and lockdown and use this insight to ensure that the best things are kept and built upon while unhelpful things are avoided in future.

To those ends, we would be really grateful if you could take a few minutes to share your experience, insight and ideas by completing this survey.

How we will use your responses and store them
People who read your answers will not know who wrote them. You do not have to share your personal details; you can remain anonymous.
Your responses will never be shared with a third party and will be stored securely using a platform call LimeSurvey, we will keep your responses for a period of two years. Once this time period has expired, we will delete your data. The report devised from this survey will however be maintained for historical and memory purpose.
You will be able to save your response to these questions and keep it as a record of your experience for yourself.