NEXT STEPS

The NHS Future Forum Report states that:

“Within 5 years all those eligible for a personal health budget should be offered one”

Patients with a Personal Health Budget (PHB) are told how much money they have available for their care and support.  They are then given help and support to use this money to buy services that best meets their needs.  PHBs can be provided in many ways including:

  • A notional budget held by the commissioner
  • A budget managed on the individuals behalf by a third party
  • A cash payment to the individual (a healthcare direct payment)

NHS Nottingham City is one of 20 PHB pilot sites. During the pilot period the Government has publicly committed to supporting PHBs, and to roll out starting from October 2012. PHBs are also: one of the key deliverables set out in the Department's 2011-2015 Business Plan; are detailed in the NHS Operating Framework 2011-12 and are featured in the NHS Future Forum recommendations. Whilst there are further decisions to be made about the scope and pace of roll out, and more to learn about how to make PHBs work, most notably through the PHB evaluation report due to be published in October 2012, we need to start preparing the health service for making PHBs a reality across the country.

To facilitate this, NHS Nottingham City’s has established a ‘PHB Next Steps’ board. The aim of this board is to take a step back from the PHB pilot; assess the systems and processes put in place to facilitate it; analyse what has worked and what has not worked and learn from the findings, to develop a sustainable, efficient and effective process for providing patients with a PHB in Nottingham. 

The ‘PHB Next Steps’ board has six key objectives:

  • Objective 1 – To explore the effectiveness of the systems and processes developed during the PHB pilot.
  • Objective 2 – To explore the training and development, including change management, required to enable clinicians to offer patients a PHB.
  • Objective 3 – To develop a robust and equitable way of calculating a patient’s PHB.
  • Objective 4 – To investigate how to make PHBs sustainable for the future including:
    - budgets
    - support planning
    - direct payments
    - approval process
    - review
  • Objective 5 – To explore the provision of brokerage to people with a PHB in Nottingham – who, what, where and how?
  • Objective 6 – To work with providers to develop the market to ensure patients have real choice.

A number of local operations groups have been established to take each one of these objectives forward.

The systems and processes developed during this local project will feed into national working groups which have been established to develop a national approach to providing patients with a PHB.

If you would like any more information regarding PHBs in Nottingham please contact:

Gemma Newbery – Project Manager
Tel: 0115 8839474
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Will Nisbet – Project Assistant
Tel: 0115 8839225
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USEFUL LINKS AND INFORMATION

  • Personal Health Budgets Community: 

    The peoplehub website is now launched! Congratulations to the peoplehub team, who have worked hard to get the site looking fantastic and full of useful content

  • Visit: www.peoplehub.org.uk

  • Follow: www.twitter.com/people_hub

    This is an independent website, not paid for or run by the Department of Health, but we support it and encourage you - if you have a personal health budget, care for someone who does or want to find out more before you ask for one - to visit it, read all the content written for and by people with lived experience, and share your own experiences