Personalised Care takes a whole System approach, integrating services including health, social care, public health and wider services around what’s important to the individual. It has a long history in social care where it is commonly called personalisation. In the NHS, new approaches and disciplines have been developed to form a new model called Personalised Care which at its best complements and enhances the way personalisation works in social care.
Personalised Care is central to our System aspirations to achieve a new integrated service model for our local population in which people have more options, better support, and properly joined-up care at the right time and in the right care setting.Personalisation is also a means to focus on reducing health inequalities and address the wider determinants of health, ensuring our most disadvantaged communities get the support and assistance they need to reduce the gap in life choices and resulting health outcomes.
The Comprehensive Model
The Principles of Personalised Care
The Six Components:
- Shared Decision Making
- Enabling Choice
- Social Prescribing
- Supported Self-Management
- Personalised Care and Support Plans
- Personal Health Budgets
Personalised Care is based on a universal model developed by NHS England and referred to as “The Comprehensive Model for Personalised Care”. It is an all-age, whole population approach to Personalised Care.
The NHS Long Term Plan expects personalised care to benefit up to 2.5 million people by March 2024, giving them the same choice and control over their mental and physical health that they have come to expect in other aspects of their lives.
To achieve this requires a new way of working in the NHS, in which people have more options, better support and properly joined-up care at the right time. Most importantly, it means that people get an equal voice in planning the care they receive, and get support to manage their health and wellbeing, rather than just receiving treatment when they get ill.
It means a new relationship between people, professionals and the health and care System, shifting power and ensuring that people feel informed, have a voice, and are connected to each other and their communities. This animation explains the model:
The Principles of Personalised Care:
- It starts with the principle of “what matters to you” as opposed to “what’s the matter with you?”
- It’s about shared power and collaboration between people, families, and health professionals.
- It enables people to have choice and control over their lives.
- It moves people from being passive recipients of services to active citizens.
- It is about getting a life, not a service.
Within the Comprehensive Model, there are six key components, which are central to embedding Personalised Care.
The six components
1) Shared decision-making - equal partnerships and better conversations about what matters to patients, in the context of their whole life.
What is it?
People are supported to understand their care, treatment, and the support options available - and the risks, benefits, and consequences of those options - so they can make an informed decision about their preferred course of action. Shared decision making is appropriate when someone needs to make a decision about treatment when there is more than one option available (including no-treatment options).
Video produced by the Centre for Perioperative Care - featuring the BRAN question format. For alternative patient question aids for use across Coventry and Warwickshire, visit our 'It's OK to Ask' campaignpage.
It might sound easy, but having a productive, personalised conversation with a patient – one in which you both understand the real situation, and what can and is being done about it – is a skill.
Staff in patient-facing roles can be trained in SDM, and patients and people prepared to have this shared conversation with health and care professionals.
How do I embed Shared Decision Making in my professional practice and my organisation?
2) Enabling choice – giving people choice over the treatment and the services they can access.
What is it?
In many cases there is a legal right to choose where you have your NHS treatment. NHS England wants everyone treated by the NHS to be able to say:
I have discussed with my GP or healthcare professional the different options available to me.
I was given the opportunity to choose a suitable alternative provider.
Information to help me make my decisions was available and accessible for me.
I was given sufficient time to consider what was right for me.
Read more about the NHS Choice Framework.
How do I embed Enabling Choice in my professional practice and my organisation?
3) Social prescribing – connecting people to their communities and non-medical support.
What is it?
Social prescribing enables local health and care services to refer people to a link worker, who will connect them to community-based support. The support proposed should build on what matters to the person as identified through their shared decision making conversation.
Social prescribers provide an important bridge between services, the local community and voluntary sector, individuals, and mutual aid groups. They spend time talking to people and finding out what matters to them and how they want to interact with and participate in their local communities.
NHS England’s target is for more than 1,000 social prescribing link workers to be in place by March 2024, and more than 900,000 people referred to social prescribing.
How do I embed Social Prescribing in my professional practice and my organisation?
4) Supportedself-management – health coaching, self-management education and peer support.
What is it?
Helping people with long term conditions to increase their knowledge, skills and confidence to better manage their health and wellbeing. Through a process known as ‘patient activation’, increasing the knowledge, skills, and confidence a person has in managing their own health and care by putting in place interventions such as health coaching, self-management education and peer support.
How do I embed supported self management in my professional practice and my organisation?
5) Personalised care and support plans – the opportunity for people with long term conditions to co-create their own plan.
What is it?
Personalised care and support planning is the process that enables someone with care and support needs to have a structured conversation about what matters to them, what they can do to manage their health, and what support they need from formal and informal services.
The process results in a plan which sets out their health and wellbeing goals, and how they will be achieved. The ambition is for everyone with a long-term condition to have the opportunity to co-create their own plan. The plan should also be the facility through which people tell their story once, and once only, instead of repeating it many times to different health and care professionals.
By March 2024, 750,000 people across the country are expected to have Personalised Care and Support Plans in place to manage their long-term health conditions.
How do I embed personalised care and support planningin my professional practice and my organisation?
6) Personal health budgets – giving people with the most complex needs direct control over their care.
What is a personal health budget?
An amount of money to support a person’s identified health and wellbeing needs, planned and agreed between them and their local ICS. This isn’t new money, but a different way of spending health funding to meet the needs of an individual. Personal health budgets give people with long term conditions and disabilities more choice and control over the money spent on them and the support they receive.
NHS England’s target is for 200,000 people to have personal health budgets by March 2024, enabling them to control their own care.
How do I embed personal health budgets in my professional practice and my organisation?
Find out more
- The NHS long-term plan explained | The King's Fund (kingsfund.org.uk)
- Find out more about Personalised Care on the NHS England website
Keep an eye on the 'What's new - latest additions to these resources' page, as we will be continually uploading new resources, case studies and more as they are published.
Contact Us
For any enquiries, please contact us here anda member of the Personalisation team will be in touch with you as soon as possible.
