Direct payment is a healthy option

In the UK, current health care policy is focused on increasing choice and control for people who use services, and on developing more effective support for people with long-term conditions. As part of these agendas, there is talk of ‘personalisation’, of the ‘expert patient’ (who is able to use their knowledge of their condition to support others) and of ‘contestability’ (creating more of a genuine market in health care). In both primary and acute care, there are also new systems that help government spending on health care to get closer to individual patients (under ‘payment by results’, the funding follows the patient as they go into hospital; under ‘practice-based commissioning’, local groups of General Practitioners will be able to commission new services locally).