£5bn integration funding for health and social care
- 10 Apr
Councils and NHS commissioners are about to share a pooled budget of over £5bn to deliver integrated health and social care services.
Care and support minister, Norman Lamb, has informed a social care conference that the governments £3.8bn ‘Better Care Fund' would be supplemented by further funding from local authorities and clinical commissioning groups, reports the Guardian.
"Local areas have chosen to be more ambitious, to pool more of their budgets than we had asked them to," said Lamb. "This has to be the start of a shift towards a much greater pooling of resources."
Patients did not want to "feel like they are being pushed from one system to another", the minister said, adding: "They don't make a distinction between health and social care."
Speaking at the School for Social Care Research annual conference in London, Mr Lamb told delegates that policy on health budgets will be extended and from October people will get not just a right to request a personal budget, but a right to have a personal budget.
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