Continuing Health Care funding - Retrospective Review requested by County Council - what to expect?

BooJewels

I hope this is the best board to post this - most search results were old, but in this forum.

My late father was in a care home for a little over 12 months at the end of his life.  We had a perpetual battle over funding - with the county council initially and then they were assessing him for Continuing health Care.  That just went on for months and months - twice I went the 50 miles to attend a meeting and on one occasion one person didn't turn up, so it didn't go ahead, then another was re-scheduled, I again made the journey and no one else turned up.  By the time they were rescheduling a third assessment, the home had locked itself down before lockdown, so it didn't happen and he passed away in the middle of lockdown.  He'd paid every penny of his fees himself.

We've just received a letter saying that the county council have asked for his case to be retrospectively reviewed and have asked if we'd like to go ahead.  We have no idea if he ever would have qualified for the CHC funding, possibly not, but we were very annoyed at the time at the unprofessional way it was handled.  We never heard anything further after the day they didn't turn up.  I heard her on the phone when questioned where she was and her comment was "it's not in my diary" which was cobblers as I lent her my pen to write it in her diary at an earlier meeting.  I wonder if the review has been called for after an audit of the performance of some personnel.

The letter states that if the review finds he should have received the funding, the estate would be refunded the money.  So whilst the likelihood seems slim, it certainly seems worth pursuing.  We have to let them know within 2 weeks and they'll send us forms to complete.  The problem we now have, 16+ months on, is that I've just shredded most of his medical records and many of his papers - we decided to keep everything for a year, but only recently actually got rid of them.  We couldn't conceive of why we might still need them - this is a bolt out of the blue.

Does anyone know what format these forms might take for a review - will it follow the original 'domains' of the intended assessment/DST - breathing, continence, behaviour etc. or will the questions be something different entirely?  Just trying to assess if we'll have the pertinent information to hand that they might need - don't want to waste anyone's time if we're not going to have details or evidence.  Or if we can even remember details.

calcotti

I know little about CHC but if you do need medical records you no longer have it is possible to access them 
https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/nhs-services-and-treatments/can-i-access-the-medical-records-health-records-of-someone-who-has-died/

BooJewels

Thank you once again @calcotti - that's certainly a useful resource/service that I shall make a note of. 

It's stupid that I shredded all of his hospital appointment letters - because, why would you need them - so now couldn't even remember the names of his doctors.  Although I have found some of them since in the digital copy of his Attendance Allowance application form that I have kept.

For the record, I made a slight mistake in my OP, it is the local CCG that have asked the Midlands and Lancashire CSU to review the case.  The letter then uses phrases like 'retrospective assessment' and elsewhere 'review of his case' - so we're not quite sure if they do an assessment like they were originally intending doing, or they're going to review the situation and how it was managed.  Perhaps a bit of both.

For a multitude of reasons I don't really want to get embroiled in a drawn out paper battle with this, but there's also some degree of principle involved too.  Nor do I want to create a shedload of paper work for the care home, which I suspect that it might.