The Care Compass®Care Home & Funding · Digital PDF · Instant Download
Prepare for the CHC Assessment With Confidence
NHS Continuing Healthcare assessments decide whether the NHS fully funds someone's care — and they're notoriously hard to prepare for. This toolkit breaks the process into plain English, so you walk in ready rather than caught off guard.
The problem
CHC assessments decide a great deal, and almost nobody explains them properly first.
A Continuing Healthcare assessment decides something that matters enormously to a family's finances: whether the NHS pays for a loved one's care in full, or whether it falls to means-tested local authority funding instead. The assessment itself runs on a framework most families have never heard of until the day it lands in front of them — the 12 "domains" of need, scored by people who assess dozens of cases and know exactly what they're looking for.
Families walking in unprepared are at a real disadvantage, not because the system is deliberately unfair, but because nobody hands you the rulebook in advance. This toolkit is that rulebook, in plain English.
Who it's for
Anyone about to face a CHC assessment, or a review of one already in place.
Whether you're preparing for a first Checklist assessment, a full Decision Support Tool meeting, or an annual review of existing funding, this toolkit gives you the same grounding a well-prepared advocate would walk in with.
What's inside
14 pages, built to be used, not just read.
- All 12 domains of the Decision Support Tool explained in plain English — what each one is actually assessing
- What "Priority" and "Severe" needs mean, and why the wording assessors use matters so much
- A structured way to gather and record evidence before the meeting, so nothing gets forgotten under pressure
- The questions worth asking the assessment team, and the ones families most often wish they'd asked afterwards
- What to do if the outcome doesn't reflect what you saw in the meeting
This is general guidance to help you prepare, not legal or clinical advice — where a decision needs a specialist (a solicitor experienced in CHC appeals, for instance), we'll always say so.
Why The Care Compass
“I built The Care Compass because I needed it myself, navigating my mum's dementia and my dad's terminal illness at the same time. CHC came up in our own journey — I know how it feels to walk into an assessment on a framework nobody's explained to you first.”
— Steve Evans, founder
CHC Toolkit
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