Health Care Facts: CHC Funding Rates

Some of the statistics around the costs of care in the UK are astounding and bring into focus the need for the right advice in terms of both planning for long term care and ensuring that your care requirements are properly assessed by the NHS in the first place.

• The average amount a family spends on care home fees in a nursing home is over £45,000 over the average period of care of 2.2 years.
• The UK average fee for 2018-2019 in a private residential home was £655 per week. For a nursing home, it was £937 per week. [Which?]
• The total number of people assessed for NHS CHC was 39,338 in Q4 2018-19. Of these, 15,252 were via the Standard NHS CHC assessment route and 24,086 were via the Fast Track assessment route. The total number of people assessed as eligible for NHS CHC was 27,684 in Q4 2018- 19. [NHS England]
• We estimate there are well over 100,000 people who are unaware that they should receive NHS Continuing Care Funding (and many more who can reclaim fees already spent since March 2012).
• This means that over £4.8bn of privately paid care home fees are being incorrectly and unfairly paid by individuals who are entitled NHS Continuing Healthcare Funding.
• The NHS has already admitted that people have been wrongly assessed for NHS Continuing Healthcare Funding and have refunded care home costs that should have been funded by local Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs).
• The value of money in ‘contingent liabilities’ in CCG’s accounts rocketed to £660.5m in 2012-13, up from just £55.6m in 2011-12.
• According to the Department of Health’s annual accounts, the CCG’s contingent liabilities are ‘mainly in respect of continuing care liabilities’.
• According to the latest Laing and Buisson survey (2013), there are 431,500 elderly and disabled people in residential care (including nursing), approximately 414,000 of whom are aged 65+. This means that over 95% of care home residents are aged 65 or over.
• The total annual value of the independent sector healthcare market is £39.9 billion, £6.2 billion of which is for home care and £13.4 billion for older people’s residential care (2012/13).