What is personalised care?

Personalised care is one of the five major, practical changes to the NHS that will take place over the next five years, as set out the recently published Long Term Plan. Working closely with partners, the NHS will roll out personalised care to reach 2.5 million people by 2023/24 and then aim to double that again within a decade.

Personalised care means people have choice and control over the way their care is planned and delivered. It is based on ‘what matters’ to them and their individual strengths and needs.

This happens within a system that makes the most of the expertise, capacity and potential of people, families and communities in delivering better outcomes and experiences.

Personalised care represents a new relationship between people, professionals and the health and care system. It provides a positive shift in power and decision making that enables people to have a voice, to be heard and be connected to each other and their communities.

This approach learns from the experience of social care in embedding personalised care in everyday practice, which has enabled people to take control over the funding for their care. It also builds on pockets of progress made in health.

Critically, personalised care takes a whole-system approach, integrating services around the person including health, social care, public health and wider services. It provides an all-age approach from maternity and childhood right through to end of life, encompassing both mental and physical health and recognises the role and voice of carers. It recognises the contribution of communities and the voluntary and community sector to support people and build resilience.

Personalised care:

  • improves people’s health and wellbeing, joins up care in local communities, reduces pressure on stretched NHS services and helps the health and care system to be more efficient.
  • helps people with multiple physical and mental health conditions make decisions about managing their health, so they can live the life they want to live, based on what matters to them, as well as the evidence-based, good quality information from the health and care professionals who support them
  • recognises that, for many people, their needs arise from circumstances beyond the purely medical, and will support them to connect to the care and support options available in their communities.
  • brings six different parts of the health system together based on a growing evidence base of what has worked in shared decision making, personalised care and support planning, enabling choice, social prescribing and community based support and personal health budgets and integrated personal budgets.

Personalised care and the NHS Long Term Plan

Personalised care is one of the five major, practical changes to the NHS that will take place over the next five years, as set out the recently published NHS Long term Plan. This follows a decade of evidence-based research working with patients and community groups and included the following key changes:

  • Rolling out the NHS Comprehensive model of Personalised Care, so that 2.5 million people can have choice and control over support for their mental and physical health.
  • Ensuring up to 200,000 people benefit from a personal health budget by 2023/24, so they can control their own care, improve their life experiences and achieve better value for money.
  • Putting in place over 1,000 social prescribing link workers by the end of 2020/21, rising further by 2023/24, with the aim that over 900,000 people are connected to wider community services that can help improve health and well-being.
  • Rolling out training to help staff identify and support people in the last year of their life, to jointly develop a personalised and proactive care plan which reduces avoidable hospital admissions and more people able to die in a place of their choosing.

Further information