Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure that patients with long-term conditions are given the opportunity to develop personalised care plans with the healthcare professionals delivering their care.

Personalised care planning is an important tool in empowering patients with long term conditions (LTCs) to take control of, and make decisions about, their care. Care planning continues to be promoted by NHS England through the Coalition for Collaborative care; an alliance of people and organisations committed to making person-centred, collaborative care the norm. In partnership with the Coalition, NHS England produced tools and guidance to support clinicians and commissioners to embed care planning locally, including around population risk-stratification to help identify those patients who could benefit most from a personalised care planning approach.

Personalised care plans are also an important feature of the clinical guidelines published by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which set out best practice in the management of LTCs. They also form the basis of a Personal Health Budget (PHB), and NHS England is working to ensure that between 50,000 and 100,000 people will benefit from a PHB by March 2021. Care plans are also an important element of NHS England’s self-care programme, and in July 2016 NHS England agreed a deal to grant 1.8 million people with LTCs across 27 areas access to the Patient Activation Measure (PAM). The PAM is a validated tool which captures the extent to which people feel engaged and confident in taking care of their health, helping professionals to tailor support to meet their needs using approaches such as care planning.