Your NHS Continuing Healthcare assessment

Each assessment measures a person’s healthcare needs against a set of national criteria set out by the NHS. Those meeting the criteria will be eligible for Continuing Healthcare, paid for by the NHS. Handling assessments in this way helps make NHS Continuing Healthcare decisions fair and equal for everyone.

See What is Continuing Healthcare? for more information.

Your assessment: our role

If you’ve had a letter from your local NHS team (also called Clinical Commissioning Group – or CCG) saying they’d like us to help with your assessment, you probably want to know more about us and what we do.

Our job is to prepare your Continuing Healthcare assessment in a fair and balanced way. We review and assess your care needs following the procedures and standards set out in the National Framework for NHS Continuing Healthcare

We are not the decision-makers for your assessment. That task is the responsibility of your local NHS team.

What we do

• If you have told your local NHS team you are happy for us to prepare your assessment, we will get in touch with you or your representative to introduce ourselves
• We arrange a time for one of our team to carry out your assessment and, depending on your needs, we may ask other professionals to take part
• If you live in a care home we’ll also get one of the senior staff involved, as they’ll have a good knowledge of your care needs
• We will gather all the information needed to prepare your case for NHS Continuing Healthcare, and keep you updated about what is happening
• We prepare the documents for the professionals who will recommend if you are eligible for NHS Continuing Healthcare – or we provide a recommendation to your local NHS team regarding eligibility

Your local NHS team will review the recommendations, and write to you with the decision and what the next steps are.

Retrospective NHS Continuing Healthcare reviews

These look at a person’s past care needs, and if these needs would have made them eligible for NHS Continuing Healthcare.

If you’ve had a letter about the review, it’s probably because you are the named family contact, or the person’s chosen representative.

It will ask you if you are happy for us to help prepare the review. If you say yes, we will gather and prepare information about the person’s care needs. The NHS will pay for our services, but we work independently of them to produce a fair and balanced report.

Our job may involve:

• Collecting any supporting records or documents – like GP and community nursing notes, social services assessments and details of any stays in hospital
• Using this information to prepare a case file and a Needs Portrayal document – this records a person’s care needs against a nationally-agreed set of 12 categories like ‘skin’, ‘continence’ and ‘behaviour’

Then we:

• Send you a draft copy of the Needs Portrayal
• Meet, or arrange a phone call with you, to check we have included all the care needs in the Needs Portrayal – you can add your views to it
• Update the Needs Portrayal and send you a final version – you can add any further thoughts before you sign it and return it to us
• Prepare the documents for the professionals who will recommend if you are eligible for NHS Continuing Healthcare – or we provide a recommendation to your local NHS team regarding eligibility

Your local NHS team makes a final review of the team’s decision, and then contacts you with the outcome. They will also tell you what happens next, and what to do if you are unhappy with the result.

More about Blauw Bear and who we are