This new briefing from the NHS Confederation introduces joint personal budgets for health and social care. It gives the context behind their development, explains how they might work and lists some of the issues that need to be considered before they could be used at scale.
Delivering integrated care is obviously hugely beneficial to the individual, but it’s only possible if excellent relationships exist at a local level and front-line staff have a shared vision for how to work together.
Key points from the 5-page briefing include:
- From October, it is the Government’s intention to begin a national roll-out of personal health budgets (PHBs)
- With over 300,000 personal budget holders in social care, NHS organisations should think hard about developing their PHB systems alongside local authority partners
- A joint system of personal budgets could offer a new model for delivering bottom-up integrated care
- A ‘dual carriageway’ approach has been developed by some pilot areas as a way of getting the benefits of joint personal budgets with a minimum of disruptive organisational change
The ‘dual-carriageway’ model of joint personal budgets is presented in a clear diagram in the briefing, which helps to show how this approach can start to bridge some of the gaps that currently exist across the health and social care divide.
Link
Joint personal budgets: a new solution to the problem of integrated care? (PDF) NHS Confederation, 11 Oct 2012.
