About the pilots

Over half the primary care trusts in England applied to participate in the personal health budgets pilot programme. Now 63 sites have provisional pilot status.

Personal health budgets list of pilot sites

Twenty of these have been selected for an in-depth study, as part of a wider evaluation exploring the potential of personal health budgets to benefit different groups of people and how the NHS can make them work.

We believe that personal health budgets could give patients a better experience and better care by giving them as much control over their healthcare as is appropriate for them. Our main aim in introducing personal health budgets, however, is to support the cultural change that is needed to create a more personalised NHS.

This is a very different way of commissioning services, and we know there are many details and complexities to work through. That is why we are piloting personal budgets, and evaluating the work that the pilot sites will do.

The pilot programme will run for three years, until 2012.