The biggest secret of personal budgets is no one wanted them, not users, not professionals, not the government, and not even Simon Duffy. We all wanted Individual Budgets! The idea of individual budgets was that funding from local authority social care, Independent Living Fund, Access to Work and others would come together to form a single budget, great idea. I was part of the Individual Budget pilot in Coventry and maybe one of the few people in the country who can claim they still have an individual budget. The problem was the Independent Living Fund refused to cooperate and I […]
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Tag Archives: Personal Health Budgets
Personal budgets are in the headlines after Pulse published research based on FOI requests to CCGs. The headline on BBC’s Today programme was “Treats instead of Treatments” and the line promoted by Pulse was that Personal Health Budgets (PHBs) lead to inappropriate ‘non-evidenced based’ spending by the NHS. The examples provided included a summer house, a Wii Fit consul, an iRobot, holidays, horse-riding, music lessons and a sat nav device; or as Pulse put it in their scare headline: “NHS allows patients to splash cash on holidays, summer houses and Wii Fits.” Interestingly this shock headline generated the most intense […]
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The need to defend the NHS and its core principles is so important that it is sometimes difficult to have conversations on the left about ways people can direct their own health care alongside supportive professionals. Ideas that stray from the need for more cash and more staff (both of which I think are needed) are often vehemently dismissed as at best naïve (dupes of the right, inadvertently opening doors to privatisation) or at worst evil (deliberately seeking to smash collectivism). It sometimes seems that to dismiss any innovation, all that is needed is to use one of the dog […]
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Vidhya Alakeson at the Resolution Foundation thinks Labour should support personal health budgets RCGP paper on personal health budgets Independent evaluation of the personal health budget pilot programme Some people see personal budgets as the end of the NHS as we know it. I think if they think Lansley plans to give all patients a personal budget they are living in another world. For those who don’t know this territory there has always been a budget for people who qualify for Continuing Healthcare – mostly people with extreme disability. The big change is that they can decide how its spent. It’s […]
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