How long should the move from a joint care budget to chc funding take?

If a person has qualified for full CHC after going through a decision support tool mapping of assessments exercise, and being found to have got a primary health need, the local authority doesn’t have the legal power to continue meeting need, because of s23 of the Care Act. So, whilst nothing is instantaneous these days, the transition to who is PAYING should be immediate. The decision making process by the ICB could take longer, because it is not bound by the Local Authority’s prior assessment or care plan, but it’s an obviously relevant and respect worthy starting place, in terms of the public law obligation on the ICB to make a rational decision for itself – which would have to account for the perhaps heightened input necessitated by the finding of ‘primary health need’.

If it was already a joint budget, that ‘implies’ the that the ICB already understood and acknowledged that the person had some purely health driven needs that it was already not right for the Council to regard as social care, but since there is no list anywhere, it was better to shove some money into the package the council had been providing – or in unusual cases, actually separately commissioning those. So there ought not to be any issue regarding the meeting of the need, just because someone has now qualified for CHC. What will be different, potentially, is the person’s benefits and whether the ICB will treat the same things as the person got disability related expenditure disregarding from their means assessment for charges, for, as things that should go into the plan, and budget from the ICB – because of course, there is no ‘charge’ for CHC patients, off of which to net expenditure on disability related services or items being bought privately.