Since the NHS Long Term Plan (LTP) was published on 7 January 2019, the Universal Personalised Care: Implementing the Comprehensive Model has been published.
The document defines personalised care: people have choice and control over the way their care is planned and delivered based on ‘what matters’ to them and their individual strengths, needs and preferences.
There are six components to the model:
- Shared decision making
- Personalised care and support planning
- Enabling choice, including legal rights to choice
- Social prescribing and community-based support
- Supported self-management
- Personal health budgets and integrated personal budgets.
The document sets out the key principles of each component and what evidence would show that it is implemented.
Social prescribing – includes a reference to the need for this to be appropriately funded. There should be a one stop shop connector service with link workers (up to 5 per Primary Care Network) about to connect people to community groups and voluntary organisations that are supported to receive referrals. There should be community-based approaches to providing peer support. ARMA would argue that there is a role for patient groups in providing this peer support.
Supported self-management – This can include:
- Health coaching or structured group coaching course
- Self-management education approaches (face-to-face and virtual), which include disease-specific, generic and online self-management courses
- Peer support through a link worker
Personal health budgets – People will have an indication of how much money they have available for healthcare and support, enough to meet the health and wellbeing needs and outcomes agreed in the personalised care and support plan. They will be able to use the money to meet their outcomes in ways and at times that make sense to them, as agreed in their personalised care and support plan.
Implementation
The document lists 21 actions needed to deliver personalised care at scale. These include:
- Workforce training, including to all GPs.
- An intensive face to face training programme for 75,000 health care professionals by 2023/4
- Recruit and train over 1,000 social prescribing link workers by 2020/21
- Work with partners in the voluntary and community sector, and others, to explore the best models for commissioning the local voluntary and community sector to support innovative provision.
- Support for programmes to enable self-management
- Train up to 500 people with lived experience to become system leaders by 2023/24.
For more details, see the full universal personalised care document.