>>Voice Over: As part of ‘NHS Continuing Healthcare’, Clinical Commissioning Groups
have a legal duty to offer ‘personal health budgets’ to those who are eligible.
These budgets allow people to receive care and support that best suits them.
Previously, the NHS would decide what form
of care and support a person received, and when they’d receive it.
However with personal health budgets, the recipient (or their representative) can decide
what outcomes they want to achieve, and how their budget will be used to meet these outcomes,
with the agreement of their NHS team.
That means people have more choice, control and flexibility, over their care and support.
So how does this work in practice?
Let’s say Jill has just been found eligible for NHS Continuing Healthcare.
There are six steps you’ll need to take:
1. Firstly, you have a duty to tell Jill about personal health budgets, and provide information
to help her decide whether such a budget is right for her.
2. If it is, you should work with Jill, or her representative, to assess what her health
and wellbeing needs are.
3. Based on these needs, you should calculate how much money Jill would require for her
ongoing care and support.
4. Together with Jill, make a care plan, detailing what’s important for her health and wellbeing,
and how the money will be used.
5. You should arrange with Jill how to put her plan into practice, making sure that everything
is in place to meet her needs. This might involve ‘direct payments’ to Jill, or
paying a ‘3rd party budget’ to an independent organization, who’ll manage the money on
Jill’s behalf. If the NHS manages Jill’s budget for her, that’s called a ‘notional
budget’.
6. Lastly, you should check in regularly with Jill, to make sure everything’s going well,
and adjust her plan, or budget, where needed.
There are different ways to approach each of these steps. So it’s a good idea to talk
to people like Jill, when figuring out the best approach for them and your CCG.
This process should fit in with your existing case management for NHS Continuing Healthcare,
and provide new options for people whose preferences might not be fully met through traditional
arrangements.
It might be challenging for you to find a balance between giving people more choice
and flexibility, and maintaining clinical accountability.
It might also be challenging to ensure that your decisions about personal health budgets
are both fair to everyone receiving NHS services, and sustainable for the NHS.
So to manage these challenges, your CCG should form a group of people for you to work with,
from different areas of your organization, and possibly your local authority and recipients
of NHS services.
This group will help make sure there’s clinical and financial governance at all stages.
It’s worth noting that you’re not using new money for personal health budgets. You’re
using money that’s already available for care and support, but in a different way.
Personal health budgets might be relatively new, but the evidence is that they help people
have a better experience of care and support, and improve their quality of life.
To find out more visit www.england.nhs.uk/personalhealthbudgets