21 January 2022
The Personal Wheelchair Budget (PWB) can sometimes feel like a confusing system to understand. We spoke to George, a Personal Wheelchair Budget Liaison Officer, to find out more about it.
The Personal Wheelchair Budget system exists to give those who use wheelchair services the ability to be more involved in their care and support their own choice of wheelchair. It means we can work more holistically with other care providers and the people who use our services to come up with imaginative solutions to meet their needs and expectations.
There are three options of Personal Wheelchair Budget.
In options one and two, your clinician will discuss with you the possibilities and flexibilities within the NHS prescription. You might decide you want to personalise or explore wider options than the NHS prescription, but still keep it within our NHS provision. These parts remain NHS property and your NHS wheelchair service is responsible for maintaining them.
In option three you decide that you do not want the NHS provided equipment and would rather take a contribution from the NHS and buy a different wheelchair.
You provide the NHS with a specification of the equipment you would like to buy, the clinicians double check that it will be clinically appropriate for you, and then an amount is provided direct to your supplier, equivalent to the value of the NHS prescribed chair with a contribution towards maintenance. The wheelchair becomes your property and you are responsible for maintaining it. The NHS will not provide another wheelchair or a Personal Wheelchair Budget until this budget has expired, unless your clinical needs significantly change. This is usually three years for children and five years for adults.
Option three has allowed the people who use wheelchair services access to more specialist active user wheelchairs, lighter attendant propelled wheelchairs, and wheelchair brands that they are more familiar and used to. We recently provided a budget for a lightweight folding powerchair for one of our clients. They had recently become unable to self propel and needed a powerchair, but as they did not have their own transport, they needed it to be able to fit in the back of a regular car. As a service this is not something that we could provide, but with our contribution they only had to pay for about half of the cost of that lightweight powerchair.
There are some implications to understand, so it’s really important to talk to your local wheelchair service first, but it can be a great way to get the wheelchair you want at a discounted price and with clinical approval.
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