Personal health budgets (PHB’s) are a new innovation that have been piloted across England between 2009 and 2012.
They are targeted at patients with long-term conditions.
A personal health budget is an amount of money to support your identified health and wellbeing needs. Your application is planned and agreed between you, your representative, or, in the case of children, the 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 your care. PHB’s mean it can be spent more flexibly to meet your identified needs.
The use of personal health budgets is just one way in which the NHS can tailor services and support for people to enable you to have choice, control and flexibility over your care.
There are five key features of a personal health budget that will ensure your experience has the best outcomes possible. Ideally, you or your representatives should:
- Know upfront how much money you have available for healthcare and support.
- Be enabled to choose the health and wellbeing outcomes you want to achieve, in dialogue with one or more healthcare professionals.
- Be involved in the design of your care plan.
- Be able to request a particular model of budget that best suits the amount of choice and control with which you feel comfortable.
- Be able to spend the money in ways and at times that make sense to you, as agreed in their plan.
Who can have a Personal Health Budget?
From October 2014 people who are assessed as or are already eligible for NHS Continuing Health are (CHC) as defined by the National Framework for Continuing Health Care and NHS-funded Nursing Care November 2012 (revised) and families of children eligible for CC as defined by the National Framework for Children and Young People’s Continuing Care will have a “right to have” a personal health budget.
Is a personal health budget for me?
Person-centred care and care planning is at the heart of making personal health budgets work well. If you apply and are granted a personal health budget we will work with you to discuss and plan your care.
We will then devise a care plan that will clearly set out the health and well-being needs that your personal health budget is to address, the intended outcomes that the plan is to achieve, the amount of money in the budget and how this is going to be used to meet the individual’s assessed needs and agreed outcomes.
These may relate to both health and well-being outcomes. This plan has to be agreed by your local Clinical Commissioning Group before it is out into place.