What is a personal health budget?
A personal health budget is an amount of money to support your health and wellbeing needs, which is planned and agreed between you (or someone who represents you), and your local NHS team. It is not new money, but it may mean spending money differently so that you can get the care that you need.
Personal health budgets are a way of personalising care, based around what matters to people and their individual strengths and needs. They give people with long term health conditions and disabilities more choice, control and flexibility over their healthcare.
We are looking to develop our personal health budget offers for those eligible for Section 117 aftercare and Personal Wheelchair Budgets.
Personal wheelchair budgets
Since 2nd December 2019, all those eligible for an NHS wheelchair now have more control over decisions made about their care and choice of wheelchair with individuals to be entitled to personal wheelchair budgets.
Frimley Clinical Commissioning Group in conjunction with NHS England is working closely with the Wheelchair Services to develop a Personal Wheelchair Budget (PWB) offer to replace the current Voucher Scheme.
Personal Wheelchair Budgets are available for some wheelchair users to provide a greater choice of wheelchairs.
Under the new system individuals will have three options:
- Notional Personal Wheelchair Budget (standard NHS provision). This means the provision of a wheelchair which will meet an individuals identified needs.
- Notional Personal Wheelchair Budget with contribution. This option allows an individual or another agency (such as a Council or a voluntary or charitable organisation) to contribute their personal budget towards an NHS wheelchair or add additional features.
- Third Party Personal Wheelchair Budget. This allows an individual to use their personal budget as a contribution to buying a wheelchair from an independent retailer outside of the NHS. This is only available if the wheelchair is deemed clinically appropriate following a discussion with a Wheelchair Therapist.
During the assessment a clinician will work with the individual to identify their needs and establish what they want from their wheelchair. The individual will be given a personal wheelchair budget that is equivalent to the cost of their prescribed wheelchair. Depending on the type of personal wheelchair budget the individual has, they could have the option to top up the budget which may allow them to add an additional feature to their prescribed wheelchair or they could use their wheelchair budget to buy a wheelchair from another approved supplier.
Frimley CCG recognises that from 2nd December 2019 individuals have the right to ask for a personal wheelchair budget however capacity, resources and skills to meet all requests is likely to result in the need to prioritise and take a phased approach to the roll out of personal wheelchair budgets.
The CCG will consider all requests on an individual basis and if unable to provide a personal wheelchair budget the individual will be signposted to commissioned services for a personalised conversation.
