Nhs continuing healthcare

Hi SVFM

An assessment for NHS Continuing Healthcare (CHC) should take place before anyone pays a penny in care fees - and before any health or social care professional asks about a person's financial situation. Your relative should be assessed for CHC before being discharged from hospital. This is set out in the Care Act, and yet many people working in health and social care don't have proper training and don't understand the law. Insist that a "Checklist assessment for NHS Continuing Healthcare" is done before the discharge team clear your relative for discharge. If they do say he/she is being discharged, remind them of their legal responsibilities under the Care Act to do the CHC assessment before this happens. Makes sure you're present when the assessment is done.

There is a very important distinction between local authority (social) care and NHS care – the former is means tested, the latter isn’t. And that distinction does NOT depend on how much money your relative has; it depends only on their care needs. Remember also that CHC is available in residential care homes, nursing care homes and also in a person's own home. The location doesn't matter - nor do the qualifications of the person/people delivering the care, nor does the diagnosis a person may; what matters are their day-to-day care needs only, regardless of the cause.

There are different stages to the assessment process. Don’t be put off by people within health and social care who may tell you it’s ‘not worth it’ or that your relative ‘won’t qualify’ or that a person has to be at ‘end of life’ or some such other nonsense. No one can say whether or not your relative should receive the CHC funding until care needs have been properly measured against the CHC eligibility criteria. Those care needs must also be viewed in the light of the legal limit beyond which a local authority cannot provide care – and beyond which any means test or financial assessment would be illegal. (Google the 'Coughlan case'.)

The fundamental point in all of this and the deciding factor in ALL NHS Continuing Healthcare assessments is whether a person’s care needs are primarily social care needs or primarily healthcare/nursing care needs. If the latter, the person should be fully funded via CHC. This means no means testing, no financial assessments and no top up fees to pay.

Read up on the assessment process as much as you can before the assessment (there are two main stages); the more the assessors realise a family knows what should and shouldn't happen, the more likely the assessors are to do things properly.

Hope that helps. I have been through this process for my own family more than once - successfully - and have helped many others secure CHC funding too.