Technical / Personalised care unwrapped

The NHS long-term plan committed to delivering more personalised care, giving people more choice and control over care. The aim is for the NHS personalised care model to reach 2.5 million people by 2023/24, doubling this by 2028/29.

A comprehensive model, co-produced with a range of stakeholders, identifies six components of personalised care:

• Shared decision making
• Personalised care and support planning
• Enabling choice
• Social prescribing and community-based support
• Supported self-management
• Personal health budgets.

The model describes how the whole population will be supported to manage their physical and mental health and wellbeing through shared decision-making, social prescribing and choice, for example with maternity, elective and end-of-life care.

The 30% of the population with long-term health conditions will be targeted using proactive case finding and given personalised care and support planning. They will be supported to self-manage where possible and given access to health coaching and peer support. The 5% of the population with the most complex needs will also receive support from multidisciplinary teams using personal health and integrated personal budgets.

Under the plans, primary care networks will be a key delivery mechanism, with social prescribing and shared decision-making to be mainstreamed in primary care

The HFMA bitesize courses are all delivered online – the five new courses mean 34 free courses are now available across the NHS. To date, these courses – which typically take between three and 10 hours to complete, depending on the level of the course – have been accessed more than 36,000 times since they were launched in March 2020.

The five personalised care courses (see box) provide an introduction to the aims of personalised care and the context provided by the NHS long-term plan, while also drilling into more detailed aspects.

NHS England and NHS Improvement supported the production of the new courses, building on joint work to promote the personalised care agenda. Hugh Groves (pictured), finance lead for NHS personalised care at NHS England and NHS Improvement, said that, while personalised care has been around for a while, the launch of the Universal personalised care delivery plan in 2019 has given the approach new momentum.

‘The aim is to improve everyone’s understanding of the potential financial and non-financial benefits of the personalised care approach,’ he said. ‘The bitesize suite of courses provide good information on the concepts and benefits of the approach. And, while they are targeted at finance, commissioning and contracting staff, they also have real value for clinicians and other managers working across integrated care systems, clinical commissioning groups, trusts, primary care networks, social care and the voluntary sector.’

The courses – which take about six hours to complete – complement the existing bitesize short course on personal health budgets.

Bitesize personalised care courses