Individual budgets and the interface with healthcare

Abstract

Abstract Following significant successes in adult social care, policy and practice debates have increasingly started to focus on the potential to extend direct payments and individual budgets into forms of healthcare. After initial policy hostility, there is now significant momentum for change, and draft legislation is currently being discussed to enable this to happen in a series of local pilots (the Health Bill 2009). Against this background, this paper explores lessons from social care individual budget pilot sites in order to set out some of the key barriers and success factors likely to influence proposed healthcare pilots.