What will care cost YOU?

The Health and Care Transformation Programme* invited feedback on two alternative options of paying for Nursing, Residential and Home Care.

We presented the ‘Mixed Model’ (based on the Jersey ‘threshold and cap’ system) and the ‘Free Personal Care’ Model (based on the NHS-style Scottish model) for feedback.

Both options would increase Government’s contribution towards the cost of ‘Personal Care’, making it available to more people than it supports today.

Both models would enable more people to protect more of their assets and income and would provide the option for more people to receive their care at home (if safe and appropriate for them to do so).

However, if Government pays more towards care in either new model, the additional cost to Government will fall to society to pay. This means that people will pay for it throughout their life instead.

The consultation gave you the opportunity to say which model you think would provide a better way of paying for care in the future (or if you would prefer to keep the current model) and enabled you to give your feedback on details regarding the model design.

The public consultation opened on the 10 November 2023 and closed on the 12 January 2024. The Department received 1227 responses to the consultation, including almost 5000 free text comments.

It was one of the top 10 highest response received for a Government consultation in recent years, demonstrating how strongly many people feel about this issue. This volume of responses, with so many of you taking the time to share your experiences, suggestions, concerns and ideas has proved invaluable as a source of insight into your views. Thank you for taking the time.

The downside has been that the level of detail and complexity of many comments led to a much slower turnaround time for the small team to finalise and publish the results than they would have liked. Our apologies for the delay and thank you for your patience waiting for us to share the results.

The overwhelming opinion was that the current model of paying for care needs to change.

The ‘Free Personal Care’ model was selected as the preferred model by the majority of respondents, albeit by a slim margin.

A significant majority felt that there should be a limit or ‘cap’ to how much an individual should spend on care from their personal assets and income and a number commented that the proposed example thresholds** in the Mixed Model were too low or that there should be a sliding scale proportional to income and assets rather than a standard threshold applicable to all.

Many referenced that more needed to be done to support more people on middle income levels (that is, people with income levels above that which would make them eligible for income support in the current system but not enough to make them ‘high net worth’) to help them protect some of their assets.

The Department is grateful to the individuals and organisations who responded to the consultation. All responses received have now been analysed and used to create a consultation summary report, which has been published on this page. The report also includes example comments from those who agreed that we could publish their responses.

In addition to summarising the responses received, the report highlights recurring themes and preferences and sets out the next steps the Department is considering to take following this engagement. This includes detailed financial modelling and the development of some of the most popular ideas raised in the report to test their feasibility – financially and practically.

We will keep you updated on this work via our webpage: Nursing, Residential and Home Care Project at gov.im (opens in a new tab). If you should have a specific question in the meantime, please contact Francesca DeHaven via healthandcaretransformation@gov.im