1. What is a Personal Health Budget?
A Personal Health Budget (PHB) is an amount of money to support someone’s health and wellbeing needs, which is planned and agreed between them and their health team. PHBs give people more choice, control and flexibility over the support they receive.
We currently provide PHBs to Children and Young people in Tower Hamlets. PHBs can be used to buy an item, service, or membership that isn’t available through existing statutory or community support.
Each PHB request should start with personalised care and support planning, where the person works with their clinician to decide what will help them to be well and stay well. Once the mental health recovery goals are identified, they plan what is needed to achieve the goals. One of the options available is a PHB.
2. Who can access a PHB?
The Advocacy Project provides PHBs to Children and Young people in Tower Hamlets.
We no longer run the PHB services for Adults within City and Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham; Core Arts PHB Brokerage service is accepting all Personal Health Budget queries and service related re-direction from 2nd September 2024.
Please visit https://www.corearts.co.uk/phb-brokerage-service/
3. Making a case for a PHB for a child of young person
A PHB request is submitted for a child or young person in Tower Hamlets to The Advocacy Project using the online referral form. On the referral form the clinician will provide details of the person’s mental health recovery goal and clearly describe how the PHB will help the person achieve their goal. The clinician should also provide details of other support options considered and why these were not suitable.
Please see our “when to consider a PHB” flow chart for more information. We encourage clinicians to contact the PHB team to discuss PHB requests before submitting a referral by email at or by phone on 020 3869 9728.
4. How can I find out more?
The Advocacy Project has a specialist children and young people’s PHB advisor in place to support clinicians to submit PHB requests. Please contact or call 020 3869 9728 with questions, training requests or feedback and suggestions.