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A Personal Health Budget (PHB) is an amount of money to support someone’s health and wellbeing needs, which is planned and agreed between them and their health team. PHBs give people more choice, control and flexibility over the support they receive.
In North East London (City & Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham), PHBs are being used to support people to work towards an identified mental health recovery goal. PHBs can be used to buy an item, service, or membership that isn’t available through existing statutory or community support.
Reasons Budgeting Is Good For Health
Each PHB request should start with personalised care and support planning, where the person works with their clinician to decide what will help them to be well and stay well. Once the mental health recovery goals are identified, they plan what is needed to achieve the goals. One of the options available is a PHB.
The Advocacy Project is commissioned by NEL ICB to deliver the PHB service for mental health recovery in City & Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham. The PHB team process PHB referrals and support clinicians with PHB related queries.
Please share this postcard about PHBs with people who are eligible to access a PHB to support their mental health recovery. You can contact us if you would like printed copies for your team.
Patient Activation Measure
A PHB request is submitted to The Advocacy Project using the online referral form. On the referral form the clinician will provide details of the person’s mental health recovery goal and clearly describe how the PHB will help the person achieve their goal. The clinician should also provide details of other support options considered and why these were not suitable.
Please see our “when to consider a PHB” flow chart and guidance notes for more information. We encourage clinicians to contact the PHB team to discuss PHB requests before submitting a referral by email at or by phone on 020 3869 9728.
Some things can’t be funded by a PHB because there’s already support for these through different avenues. These include alternative therapy, support for de-cluttering, and household items. See our guidance notes for more details about what cannot be funded by a PHB in North East London.
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We have a streamlined pathway to fund smartphones and data for people who are eligible for a PHB. View this guidance or contact us to find out more.
The Advocacy Project has a team of PHB advisors in place to support clinicians to submit PHB requests. Please contact or call 020 3869 9728 with questions, training requests or feedback and suggestions.We’d also like to use analytics cookies. These send information about how our site is used to a service called Google Analytics. We use this information to improve our site.
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Personal Health Budgets
The NHS long term plan made a clear commitment to expand personalised care and personal health budgets, with a specific expectation that personal health budgets will be offered within mental health services as part of plans for up to 200, 000 people to benefit by 2023/24.
Personal health budgets can only be accessed following a personalised care and support planning conversation that identifies the care, support and services it will be spent on.
The extension of the legal right to a personal health budget for those eligible for aftercare services under section 117 of the Mental Health Act (1983) was, in part, a result of a national personal health budget evaluation (2014). The evaluation found that personal health budgets had positive impacts for those with mental health conditions, resulting in significant improvement to people’s quality of life and wellbeing and were cost effective.
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Further guidance is available for health and social care professionals on implementing the legal rights to personal health budgets, including section 117 after-care.
Personal health budgets are closely aligned to one of the central strands of service transformation in mental health: recovery. As a highly personal journey, recovery depends on services being able to develop individually tailored approaches.
Personal health budgets for mental health can include a range of things to give people access to care, support and services that are holistic, innovative and build on their strengths. Examples include:
Post Covid 19 Recovery Personalised Care
Carers and family members have also reported that the ‘personalised support they have received had a positive impact on their life, mental health and wellbeing. They highly valued the ways the support they received was tailored to their interests and needs, with the offer of choice and flexibility in how they were supported.’ Making a Difference to Young People’s Lives Through Personalised care, National Children’s Bureau, 2021.
“Never underestimate the power of truly engaging with your patients and service users in deciding how and what they want their recovery journey to look like. I was moments away from a secure unit, now I’m living my dream in my own flat, having adventures, every day is a day further away from my past and a day spent realising new possibilities, opportunities. All it took was somebody to walk into my life for an hour and essentially ask me “Martha, what matters to you?”
Read Martha’s story about how a personal health budget for s117 aftercare changed her life by logging onto the personal health pages of the Personalised Care Collaborative Platform.
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A qualitative evaluation of personal health budgets for mental health by the National Development Team for Inclusion, 2020 found that personal health budgets positively impacted both the people receiving a personal health budget and the sites delivering them.
“Before this budget, I might not see or speak to anybody for 2 or 3 days, now there are people in and out. They treat me with respect, not like I have mental health problems. It’s a two way thing.”
If you work within the NHS, a local authority or a voluntary sector partner, you can sign up to the Personalised Care Collaborative Network to access a range of resources, share learning and discuss issues with colleagues across the country. To discuss access please email .pccn@nhs.net.
What Are Personal Health Budgets?
Alternatively, for more information please see the overview of the support available for professionals, or contact the national Personal Health Budgets team by emailing .personalhealthbudgets@nhs.net.The NHS Long Term Plan contains a commitment to deliver 200, 000 Personal Health Budgets by 2023/24. It was an ambitious target before Covid-19 struck and sounds even more challenging now. With so many competing priorities, we ask could Personal Health Budgets be part of the solution rather than part of a problem?
According to the Office for National Statistics, the government will spend £280bn on measures to fight Covid-19 and its impact on the economy, in the current year alone.
The public purse is stretched, and the conversations are starting about how we can all save money and attempt to balance the books. The evidence base on PHBs continues to evolve, and includes:
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We have drawn on the above findings and our work with both local authorities and CCGs to develop a savings calculator for our Virtual Wallet PHB solution, which enables CCGs to identify and model their potential local savings. Saving estimates range from 5% to 25%, depending on the cohort and budget deployment model, but we would expect a CCG to be able to prudently forecast a net saving of at least 10% of the budget spend. In summary, PHBs are a proven way to make substantial cashable efficiencies, but it does take some time and effort and hence the need for CCGs to act now.
Sets out how the NHS will systematically implement the Comprehensive Model for Personalised Care to reach 2.5 million people by 2023/24, of which a total of 200, 000 people will be supported by PHBs by 2023/24.
One of the ways to achieve the 200, 000 PHBs aspiration was making them the default position for Continuing Healthcare (CHC) packages, an expectation that was paused in March 2020 due to Covid-19.
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The NHS has signalled that CCGs are expected to resume default position from September 2020, albeit subject to local capacity and readiness to support the delivery of PHBs.
The aspiration and the reinstatement of the default expectation are one perspective. Another way to approach this is from a demand viewpoint. It may not feel like it right now, but the focus on Covid-19 will pass and the public have become more attuned to - and interested in – personalised care than ever before, hence the need to get ahead of it, regardless of the targets themselves.
Identifies personalised care and digital as two of the five major, practical changes that will create the new NHS service model fit for the 21st century. Both of these represent seismic and challenging shifts in relation to people, processes and technology.
Self Directed Support With Personal Budgets And Isfs Tlap
“Covid-19 … delivered an unprecedented shock to both demand for and supply of digital health services. The results have been substantial. In its recent history, the
