Direct Payments For Health Care…Fiiinally!

Direct Payments have been the one majorly positive development in health and social care in a long time, and now it looks like the NHS has finally sat up and taken notice!

I’ve had Direct Payments for years, not at anything like the level of funding I have now, but, nonetheless, I’ve been signed up since I was about 12.

It is only because of Direct Payments that I can look forward to gaining more and more independence as time progresses, but getting the level of funding I need was no easy ride; the means tested world of social care is, as I’m sure many of you are aware, hard to navigate, illogical and unforgiving!

However, I was one of the lucky ones, many people get lost in the system and end up never getting the help they need.

Of course, Social Services and local authorities have a duty to make sure they only spend their (often extremely) limited funds on people who really need them and so it would be unfair to place the blame on them.

The fact is: there isn’t enough money.

Direct Payments from the NHS have always seemed, at least to me, to be the way forward for providing care to the most severely disabled and now it seems like this might become a reality.

The “Health Bill” which is currently before parliament will allow the NHS to provide people with a ‘Personal Health Budget’ AKA Direct Payments.

Hopefully, this will leads to many more people being able to enjoy the freedoms I do, freedoms they deserve!

What really interests, and surprises, me though, is it appears these ‘Personal Health Budgets’ can be used to pay for things other than personal care and all that stuff.

A case study on the Department of Health’s website mentions how one lady who took part in a trial of the new system used her budget to pay for hydrotherapy.

Now that might seem perfectly normal, but, if she can get hydrotherapy because it relieves her pain, does that mean if I had an NHS budget, that I would be able to get funding for a physiotherpist, in addition to my PAs?

If that’s the case, it opens a whole can of, quite frankly awesome, worms because people who currently don’t receive essential services (like physiotherapy) due to a lack of funding, may be able to do so!

Where the money would come from I don’t know, but still, we can but hope!

Here’s a link the Department of Health’s website: http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/News/Recentstories/DH_107497

Bye for now,

George