Covered aid

The need for assistance with essential daily activities (AEV)

Dependent individuals have a significant and regular need for assistance from a third party – a relative, private individual or professional – to perform essential daily activities, regardless of their age, as a result of illness or physical, mental or psychological disability.

These essential daily activities (AEV) concern assistance and care in the following five areas:

• Personal hygiene
  assistance with personal and oral hygiene, shaving and facial hair removal, menstrual hygiene
• Elimination
  assistance with elimination, assistance with changing the stoma bag or emptying the urinary bag
• Nutrition
  assistance with eating and drinking, assistance with enteral nutrition
• Dressing
• assistance with putting on or taking off clothes, assistance with putting on and taking off corrective and compensatory equipment
• Mobility
  assistance with transfers, moving around, accessing and leaving the home, changes in level

The need for assistance must be significant and regular (at least 3.5 hours/week for essential daily activities, which corresponds to the entry threshold);

It must be likely to persist for a minimum period of six months or be irreversible.

The need for technical aids and home adaptations

An application may also be made for technical aids, home or car adaptations, regardless of the need for assistance with essential daily activities. This need must result from an illness or disability lasting more than six months.

Benefits related to specific conditions: special provisions

Three groups of people are eligible for a cash benefit known as a ‘special provision’, without having a specific need for assistance with activities of daily living:

• people with impaired vision or blindness
• people who have difficulty communicating due to impaired hearing or deafness, dysarthria, aphasia, or those who have undergone a laryngectomy
• people with a symptomatic form of spina bifida.

Dependency of young children (up to the age of eight)

As all young children need their parents' help to perform essential daily tasks, the AEC determines the child's additional need for assistance due to their illness or disability compared to a healthy child of the same age.