Andrew Rosindell – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Andrew Rosindell on 2016-02-23.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps the Government is taking to increase public awareness of personal health budgets.

Alistair Burt

NHS England provides a comprehensive programme of training and support for clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to help them to develop and publish a local offer of personal health budgets by April 2016. CCGs are now also required to include their personal health budget offer in their Health and Wellbeing Strategies, which are published in the public domain. To increase public awareness further, NHS England funds a national network of people with lived experiences of personal health budgets who champion their use both nationally and locally.

NHS England has made it clear that CCGs have a duty to inform people who are eligible for NHS Continuing Healthcare that they have the right to have a personal health budget, for example including information in the letter that informs individuals they are eligible. NHS England is currently consulting on the new CCG Improvement and Assessment framework, which will ask CCGs to submit the number of personal health budgets in their local area. The results of this will be used to inform the public of how many personal health budgets have been given locally and how their area compares with the rest of the country.