This isn’t just happening with support for children with special educational needs and disabilities (£100m spent in England on failed efforts to block children’s Send support, 22 December). If you are severely incapacitated physically and/or mentally, thus requiring 24-hour care, you should be highly eligible for continuing healthcare (CHC) payments, where the NHS covers all the costs of care.
It seems that hardly anyone ever gets to hear about this without having done a lot of digging and searching. It seems rare for someone to be signposted to it by professionals. The hoops to jump through and bureaucratic blocks are immense. There are firms of lawyers who specialise solely in winning CHC payments. I’m currently using a firm to get my 91-year-old mum CHC. She has mixed dementia, is bedbound and requires 24-hour care. At no point has any professional mentioned CHC to me. The chances of me being successful without the legal help is minimal – and I’m a retired medical doctor!
It blows my mind that the firm I’m using lists 80 employees – mostly lawyers, paralegals and advocates. It occurs to me that every time they are successful, that individual deserved the payment in the first place, so why is it like trying to get blood from a stone? I can’t help feeling that the system is deliberately set up for people to fail, which seems particularly cruel as you are dealing with a very vulnerable and ill demographic, to say nothing of their carers. Yet another case of going after soft targets rather than chasing revenue from tax-evading multinational companies.
Dr Michael Duxbury
Leicester
• Do you have a photograph you’d like to share with Guardian readers? If so, please click here to upload it. A selection will be published in our Readers’ best photographs galleries and in the print edition on Saturdays.
