FOI Ref: 0189FOI1920

23rd January 2020

Freedom of Information Act 2000 – Request for Information

We are pleased to respond to your request for information and our response is set out below:

Request

In relation to the current financial year (19/20) could you please provide me with information relating to the first 20 occasions in which you sanctioned the use of a patient’s Personal Health Budget (PHB) to be spent on something that was NOT for the provision of care, medicine, or transport to a place where care or medicine was provided. 

1) For each of these 20 occasions please state (i) what the money was spent on and (ii) how much money was spent on it and (iii) the outcome the patient was working towards as a result of this spend.

Note: What I am after is any capital expenditure which is not immediately apparent as of a medical purpose. So a specialist bed would be medical and I would not want to know about it, but a large screen television for a patient with vision problems would be something that I am interested in, as somebody not familiar with the case would not be able to tell that the set had been bought because of the patient’s vision problems. The request covers PHBs for both adults and children.

Response

For Continuing Health Care (adults and children) we have no occasions where PHBs has not been spent on the provision of care, medicine or transport. We have delivered low level PHBs via the 3rd sector but we are yet to obtain the data for 19/20. This data will be available to request at the end of the financial year.