Are personal health budgets the solution to integrated care?

Integration used to mean common assessments, merged teams and management restructures. Times have changed, and it's no longer just about changing job titles and Tupe - Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment). Over the last few years the health and social care system has begun to embrace the idea of "person-centred, co-ordinated care" that shifts the focus from organisations back to the experience of the person needing support.

Some of this has become necessary because people receiving care are no longer willing to accept that certain models of institutionalised provision are right for them just because they have a particular diagnosis. Choice and control, while being policyterms that have been repeated so often that there's a risk of losing the meaning, do resonate with us all personally in the decisions in life that are most important: where we live, who's in our life, and how we spend our time.

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