NHS health budgets funding holidays, Nintendo consoles and a pedalo ride
This sort of journalism might be eye-catching but it emasculates an important principle. Namely that in an era of reduced budgets and shrinking resources at the local level people are best placed to make the decisions on how the funding which supports them is spent themselves.
Personal budgets are the means by which mutualisation of local services, based on people exercising personal choice, through initiatives such as my village companies idea can become a reality. Letting people choose for themselves removes the tyranny of some procurement models. Namely those which seek savings by building bigger and bigger contracts with multi-service agencies .The commissioners behind these strategies replace choice and accountability in the interest of terms which should be alien to local government such as “business modernisation” and “productivity”.
Public services are about people not widgets. In all the lampooning of people exercising some of their personal choices, in ways, which reflect their priorities, the author of this article would do well to reflect on that. Still in the interests of balance here is what they have to say:
NHS patients have gone on holidays and been provided with Wii games consoles, a summer house and a pedalo ride under a scheme to give patients in England personal health budgets, an investigation has found.
A satnav, a vacuum-cleaning robot, shiatsu massage and horse-riding are among other items or pursuits funded through the scheme that is designed to give patients more control over their care.
All patients needing continuing healthcare in their home or in residential care are entitled to have personal budgets to give them more control over the help they get from the NHS. The budgets must be agreed with local NHS teams.
An investigation by the medical publication Pulse, aimed primarily at GPs, has uncovered unusual uses to which some funds were put last year.
Freedom of information requests to clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) suggest they intend to spend more than £120m this year on personal budgets for 4,800 patients.