Personalisation

I had an inspirational meeting with Sian from Community Catalysts earlier this week. We talked about the role personal budgets could play in paying for community enterprise solutions to the challenge of sustainable domiciliary care in rural settings. I subsequently read this article and felt very deflated! It tells us.

What bothers McCarthy is that, in common with more than 30,000 other people with personal budgets, her funding is no longer sent to her bank account as a direct payment, but is loaded on to a prepaid card. Not only does this enable her local council to check exactly how she is spending it, but it gives it the power to veto expenditure it disapproves of.

The concerns arise as a consultation closed last Friday on proposals to extend the right to a personal budget to up to 350,000 more people in England living with long-term physical or mental health conditions, including dementia and learning disabilities. Speaking at a conference last week, NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens said: “We’re going to put a lot of welly behind personalised care over the next few years. It’s central to the future of the NHS.”

When personal budgets became available for people with long-term support needs, in the early 2000s, much attention focused on the freedom they gave individuals to pay for things that worked best for them. Instead of going to a day centre, they might pay for art classes, or buy fishing tackle, or even get a dog to get them out of the house.