About personal health budgets

A personal health budget is an amount of money to support a person's identified health and wellbeing needs, planned and agreed between the person and their local NHS team. Our vision for personal health budgets is to enable people with long term conditions and disabilities to have greater choice, flexibility and control over the health care and support they receive.

Minister of State for Care Services Norman Lamb announced the national roll out of personal health budgets on 30 November 2012. This follows the three year pilot programme in the NHS, which ended in October 2012, and the publication of an independent evaluation report, led by the University of Kent. People who are already receiving NHS Continuing Care will have a right to ask for a personal health budgets from April 2014. The new clinical commissioning groups will also be able to offer personal health budgets to others that they feel may benefit from the additional flexibility and control.