Personalisation public meeting report

Personal Budgets and Personal Health Budgets offer people with long term social care and/or continuing healthcare needs the opportunity for more independence over how their health and/or social care money is spent, be that on physiotherapy, carers to provide intensive help at home, equipment to improve quality of life or therapies like counselling. Healthwatch North Somerset considered it was an appropriate time for the issues of personalisation to be discussed in a public meeting and offered an opportunity for the public to hear from the key stakeholders and ask questions.

The meeting was held at Hangstones Pavilion, Yatton at 2.30pm. Consideration was given to the time and location of the event, and there is an understanding that any chosen time or location would exclude part of the population. To ensure Healthwatch meetings are widely accessible it seeks to ensure public meetings vary in terms of time, weekday and venue.

The meeting was attended by approximately 40 members of the public who were each given a pack which included personalisation information, feedback forms and information about Healthwatch North Somerset.

The Healthwatch North Somerset personalisation public meeting showed there was a lack of clarity about the concept of personalisation, notwithstanding there was some confusion over the similarity of the budget names - personal budgets and personal health budgets as well as direct and managed payments. The use of acronyms used in the meeting caused some additional confusion.

The concept of personalisation is complicated and the audience were keen to understand and this generated a lot of interest and questions. The meeting showed that if the explanations are simple and clear and acronyms are avoided it greatly benefits the public understanding of complicated issues.