NHS Continuing Healthcare - National Audit Office investigation

[bowlingbun]

Here is a link to the NAO publication, just released.

https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploa ... unding.pdf

[bowlingbun]

I've said on the forum many times that CHC is a postcode lottery. The report confirms this.
Page 33 states "the number of people that received, or were assessed as eligible for, funding ranged from 28 to 356 people per 50,000 population.
The estimated proportion of people that were referred, for fast track, or who were identified as needing a full assessment, and subsequently assessed as eligible ranged fro 41% to 86% excluding the CCG's with the lowest and highest percentages".

These figures are even worse than I imagined. You are almost 13 times as likely to be granted CHC in some areas, as opposed to others!!

It also stated that NHS England is giving CASH INCENTIVES to ensure that as far as possible assessments are done outside hospital, and raises the issue of who is going to fund the care meantime. I'm stunned by this, because the framework says Social Services should only be involved AFTER the CHC Assessment has been done?!

[Colin_1705]

It's all about the money.

To cut a long story, short.

[bowlingbun]

However NHS services are supposed to be free at the point of delivery. I am old enough to have visited long term hospitals full of elderly people who couldn't go home because they needed too much care, so expensive beds were being filled by people who didn't want or need to be in them. CHC was developed as it was cheaper to provide than an equivalent bed in hospital. Somewhere along the line all that has been forgotten.

[Colin_1705]

I am about as old as the NHS , born in 1949, it has changed so much since then.

[Eun]

The SNP government changed the rules on this so that you can only get this if you are in a care home or in hospital which sort of defeats the whole purpose of the thing does it not?

Eun