Throwing money at patients won’t heal the health service

ON THE surface of it, personal health budgets sound like a wonderful idea. Giving patients direct control of the money to be spent on treatments such as therapy empowers them and allows them to choose care tailored to precisely what they want and need.

This scheme has been around for several years, but this week the Government unveiled plans to roll it out more widely — from 23,000 patients to 350,000 — saying this will help tackle the inadequate and fragmented care so many receive.

But don’t be fooled: this plan is bad news for patients and bad news for the NHS.

Personal health budgets have already been tried in the Netherlands, and are now being restricted because of the problems caused.

It’s true that the care given to the most vulnerable individuals in this country is often inadequate. But the plan undermines the very NHS that these people rely on. Care is inadequate because the help these patients require is complex and expensive.

The answer lies in investing in the resources already there, not in bunging patients cash and telling them to find care elsewhere.

Take this example from my practice: anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. It ruins lives. Unlike the maximum waiting times for operations, though, there is no cap on the time my patients wait for the specialist psychotherapy treatment they need.

There is chronic underinvestment and the waiting time in many services is over a year. This is scandalous.

Surely the answer is to invest in reducing waiting lists by employing more staff, not giving the patient a minimal amount of money, which will quickly run out, to access psychotherapy elsewhere.

Also, supporting patients to develop a plan for their personal budget takes considerable time from health care professionals. And that’s more time away from other patients.

Is this simply a way of dressing up an unwillingness to properly fund NHS services and cynically selling it to the public as ‘choice’?