The purpose of this book is to set out the objectives underpinning the roll-out of personal health budgets in the National Health Service (NHS); to provide an overview of how PHBs can be implemented to best deliver on those objectives; and to identify some of the barriers to implementation and how they can be overcome. Within the NHS, PHBs are highly innovative and present new challenges to commissioners, clinicians and individuals. But just as they have a shared history with personal budgets in social care (discussed in Chapter 3), they are also part of a set of new initiatives that are driving personalisation across public services. At the heart of each initiative is a common set of principles, a similar design and a common delivery mechanism – an individual budget and a personalised plan for how the individual budget can best be deployed to help people achieve their goals. This chapter puts PHBs in the NHS into their wider context and looks at the spread of personalisation across public services.

From personalisation to open public services

As discussed later in Chapter 3, the concept of personalisation arose out of a complex interaction between the disabled people's movement for independent living and the work of think tanks and policymakers. By 2007, it had become a central idea within public service reform under the then Labour government and the governing idea in adult social care.