Extending legal rights to have personal health budgets

Our members report broad support for the principle of greater personalisation of health and care services, noting that personal health budgets (PHBs) are one facet of this wider agenda.

If PHBs are to be successfully extended, a number of key issues will first need to be addressed. These include the need for additional financial and workforce resource, the tension apparent in balancing patient control with a focus on clinical health outcomes, and the need to ensure that national patient-facing communications outline the limits of a ‘right to have’ a PHB or direct payment.

In response to some of these challenges, NHSCC outlines the additional support that CCGs require in order to extend PHBs to additional groups:

• Financial support – at a time when CCGs are facing substantial financial pressures, they need sufficient financial resource to implement and sustain the proposed changes.
• Publication of a national framework – a clearer national steer is needed for the implementation of PHBs and integrated personal budgets.
• Dissemination of good practice – our members would benefit from the provision of good practice examples for key PHB processes such as quality assurance and risk management, as well as examples of innovative use of PHBs and how best value can be achieved.

Our response has been developed based on a survey of our membership, supplemented by in-depth conversations with directors of commissioning and personal health budget/NHS Continuing Healthcare leads who have experience of implementing PHBs locally.