Welcome to the Peer Leadership Development Programme

How can good personalised care make a positive difference in people’s lives?

We are Jo Fitzgerald and Colin Royle from the Personalised Care Group at NHS England and NHS Improvement and this is the question we’ll be exploring over the next four weeks from a ‘lived experience’ perspective. This means we’ll be looking at personalised care through the eyes of people who have seen the difference it has made either for themselves, or in the life of a close family member.

For me, it was for my son Mitchell. Colin’s experience of personalised care was for his father, Malcolm. We want to share what we know so you feel more knowledgeable and confident to talk about personalised care. We will do this by sharing information, encouraging discussions and sharing examples of personalised care using real life examples.

On this course, we talk about ‘personalised care’. If you’ve been receiving health and care services over the last few years, you may be familiar with words like “person centred planning” or “personal budgets’ and may be wondering where ‘personalised care’ comes from. It’s true that what we’re talking about isn’t completely new, but what’s unique about personalised care is that it brings together several different personalised approaches.

If the idea of ‘personalised care’ is completely new to you, here’s a useful definition to get you started:

Personalised care means people have choice and control over the way their care is planned and delivered. It is based on ‘what matters’ to them and their individual strengths and needs.

Some of the words you’ll hear us say may sound a bit “clunky”, but they are the words most commonly used by the NHS to describe personalised care. We’ll explain those words as we go along.