Personal budgets to be extended to NHS

5 Oct 11
Personal budgets are to be rolled out to people with long-term health conditions, allowing them to take greater control of their treatment, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley announced yesterday.

By Richard Johnstone in Manchester | 5 October 2011

Personal budgets are to be rolled out to people with long-term health conditions, allowing them to take greater control of their treatment, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley announced yesterday.

Speaking at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, he said the extension of the budgets to the health service showed ‘the future direction of a modern NHS, which focuses on quality and gives patients more control and choice’.

Personal budgets are already used in social care, allowing disabled adults and older people to select and buy care packages that best suit their needs.

By April 2014, they will be available to the 50,000 people eligible for NHS Continuing Care. These people have complex, chronic conditions for which they receive treatment outside of hospital.

Lansley told delegates that the budgets would allow people to work with the NHS so that they could receive more personal and tailored care that fitted in with their lives.

‘This is a solution which must come as part of a cultural shift for doctors, health care professionals, providers and patients which sees the patient as an equal partner in decisions about their care. It will personalise the NHS and provide more integrated high-quality care across health and social care,’ he said.

The announcement was welcomed by the NHS Confederation. Chief executive Mike Farrar said that ‘personal health budgets are an idea whose time has come’.

However, he warned that the NHS needed to be ‘realistic’ about how big a culture change this might be for doctors, and stressed that there would be barriers that needed to be addressed.

‘In order to exploit the opportunities of personalised budgets, we need to address the fears of clinicians that it may be unethical to allow people to choose treatments and services with no evidence base – yet these are exactly the things many patients want. At the same time, patients want to maintain a good working relationship with the clinicians who support them.’

Lansley also used his speech to the party conference to defend the government’s health reform plans, saying that the changes ‘mean a better NHS for everyone’.

The government is replacing primary care trusts with clinical commissioning groups and introducing more choice and competition into the NHS.

Lansley's public backing for the reform plans came on the day more than 400 experts in public health, including 40 directors of public health, called on the House of Lords to reject the government’s health Bill due to the risks it presents to patient care and safety.

Their open letter to peers states: ‘It is our professional judgement that the Health and Social Care Bill will erode the NHS's ethical and co-operative foundations and that it will not deliver efficiency, quality, fairness or choice.’

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