People that are entitled to NHS Continuing Healthcare now have the ‘right’ to a personal health budget.
Clinicians can also offer personal health budgets to others that they feel may benefit from the additional flexibility and control. The NHS Mandate commits to a further roll out of personal health budgets to people who could benefit from April 2015.
A personal health budget is an amount of money to support a person’s identified health and wellbeing needs the application of which is planned and agreed between the individual, their representative, or, in the case of children, their families or carers and the local NHS team. It is not new money, but is money that would normally have been spent by the NHS on a person’s care being spent more flexibly to meet their identified needs.
According to the pilot and evaluation, there are five key features of a personal health budget that will ensure people experience the best outcomes possible. Ideally, individuals or their representatives should:
- Know upfront how much money they have available for healthcare and support.
- Be enabled to choose the health and wellbeing outcomes they want to achieve, in dialogue with one or more healthcare professionals.
- Be involved in the design of their care plan.
- Be able to request a particular model of budget that best suits the amount of choice and control with which they feel comfortable.
- Be able to spend the money in ways and at times that make sense to them, as agreed in their plan.
People can have a personal health budget in one of the following, or any combination of the three, ways:
1. A notional budget – where the commissioner (for example the CCG) holds the budget but utilises it to secure services bases on the outcome of discussions with the service user.
2. A third party budget – where an organisation independent of the individual and the NHS manages the budget on the individual’s behalf and arranges support by purchasing services in line with the agreed care plan.
3. A direct payment – where money is transferred to a person or his or her representative or nominee who contracts for the necessary services.
One of the changes that will take place from September 2014 is the introduction of Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans, which will replace special educational needs statements and Learning Difficulty Assessments (LDAs).
Roll out of personal budgets will take place alongside the introduction of EHC plans, and so from September 2014 children and young people assessed as needing an EHC plan will have the option of a personal budget that will bring together money from education, health and social care into a single budget.
Right now, local authorities across the country are engaging with their partners and parents to look at how these new reforms will work in reality and from September 2014 they will be publishing their ‘local offer’ which will include more detail about how personal budgets will work for families.
More general information about the SEND reforms can be found on the SEND Pathfinder website.
A guide to the SEND reforms for parents and carers has recently been published by the Department of Education.
