To cut a long story short, this week I’m stuck in hospital again after my bike got into an argument with a Tesla and it’s inattentive hit and run driver. No bones broken thankfully but it didn’t do my body much good.
Unfortunately pain and a high temperature brought me back here after the accident, whilst the medical team work out how to treat me. This has led to me sharing a bay with three other morphine fuddled old men and I’ve enjoyed listening to them recount their stories of being in the military.
Yesterday one of them was sitting with their family preparing to be discharged and I overheard them discussing amongst themselves the fact that with his level of health care needs, he no longer had enough care in place to be able to be safely discharged home to live on his own and how worried they were about this.
Listening to them trying to work out what they were going to do, I couldn’t help wanting to share my knowledge of continuing health care with them. So I jumped right in and I apologised for overhearing them and asked if they had discussed asking for continuing health care and a personal health budget for their father.
Both the man, his family and the ex service man in the bed next to their father looked at me with a mixture of bafflement and interest. The ex service man has been stuck in hospital for three months. He has been unable to go home because he is disabled, lives alone and his direct payments only cover enough for personal assistants to visit him in the morning and the evening but he now requires full time care.
So I explained…
NHS continuing care funding is money from the NHS available to support people with long term healthcare needs due to that person having a disability, health condition or an illness. It pays for the healthcare of people who can’t get the support they need from existing healthcare services. It’s subject to eligibility criteria and might pay for nursing care, personal care and support to do things during the day.
To qualify, a person has to meet a range of eligibility criteria that include their main need being a complex health care need rather than a social care need. Someone can refer themselves, their family can refer them or a health or social care worker can refer them. To be honest pretty much anyone can refer someone.
It can also be turned into a personal health budget.
Neither of them had any idea that any of this support existed and neither did any of the staff on the ward either.
Now yes the way I have described this is very simplistic and it can be perilously hard to get continuing health care and a personal health budget. But…
… this situation reminded me of three projects I’ve recently being part of with colleagues from Curators of Change where we coproduced each project. One piece of work was about supporting council leads with coproducing their advice and guidance for local people, the second piece of work focused on developing the knowledge base of council workers supporting young people with learning disability and or autism as they become young adults and don’t qualify for adult social care support, the third focused on developing the shared knowledge bae of Principle Social Workers and Council Finance leads around direct payments.
What struck me about each of these projects was that even though all the information and knowledge was out there on the internet, most people didn’t know it was there or what it meant. Even if they were doing work in one of these areas. It was also clear that conversations with each other had a major role in helping people understand what they were looking or listening to.
Going back the three befuddled old men, I’ve realised that open exchanges of information between humans are so important. In situations like this, I find it best to assume that other people don’t have the knowledge and experience that I have and that I don’t have their knowledge and experience either. This is why I think it’s important to share our knowledge and experience and to speak up when we know that that information will make a difference to someone.
The best way to learn is to acknowledge that each of us has one part of the puzzle and the best way to finish the puzzle is to finish it together. Never hide what you know, if you do others will hide what they know from you as well and everyone will end up stumbling around in the dark.
Jim Thomas
July 2025
Leave a Reply