FOI 2026/1766

I would like to request information regarding Children’s Continuing Care cases and Direct Payments held by your ICB. If data for the FY 2025/26 is not yet available, please provide the latest year-to-date figures, as appropriate.

For the latest available period, could you please provide:

1. The total number of Children’s Continuing Care cases for FY 2025/26.
2. The total spend on Children’s Continuing Care cases for FY 2025/26.
3. The total number of Children’s Continuing Care cases that were Direct Payments for FY 2025/26.
4. The total spend on Children’s Continuing Care cases that were Direct Payments for FY 2025/26.

If possible, please provide the data in a spreadsheet or machine-readable format (e.g. CSV/XLSX).

If any part of this request requires clarification to ensure a response, I would appreciate your advice on how best to proceed.

Thank you for your support with this request. I am the parent of a child with complex medical needs and have personally managed my son’s Direct Payment Personal Health Budget for the past 10 years.

I now work with families, NHS teams and ICBs through Thrive Care Solutions to support the development of sustainable Direct Payment PHB models that give families greater control over care while helping reduce dependence on agency-led provision.

The information requested will help identify areas of good practice, variation and opportunities for improvement across England so I can better support families and NHS systems working through these challenges.

1. 223
2. NHS GM commissions children’s continuing care services in a number of different ways. Most commonly these are commissioned from individual independent sector providers, but in some instances, these are commissioned under a block contract with the local NHS Foundation Trust. The nature of these block contracts means the specific cost of children’s continuing care services cannot be separately identified from within these blocks. Therefore, for services in respect of Manchester, Oldham and Salford children’s continuing care costs, these are excluded from the figure below. Note, the number of cases provided in the response to question 1 includes packages commissioned through these block contracts (48).

For the remaining locality packages of care, this totalled £11.391m

3. 86
4. £4.006m