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Can the Care Home Fees paid by a now deceased relative be reclaimed?

The simple answer is yes.

There are some common misconceptions, such as, a person paying Care Home fees must be alive when the request for a refund is made or that any claim that is in progress comes to an end if the person dies before it is resolved.

A representative of the deceased's estate, usually a relative, can ask the relevant Primary Care Trust to carry out a retrospective review. As with any other assessment it must be shown the person would have met the relevant health criteria to have been eligible for NHS Continuing Healthcare Funding.

According to Which? 48,000 people were receiving NHS Continuing Healthcare funding in 2009/10, however, as recently as 2007 the number was only 25000. This tends to suggest that unless the population has become significantly more unhealthy, many people, as recently as 2007, were either not being assessed for NHS Continuing Healthcare Funding or were being incorrectly assessed.

It should be possible to make claims for periods going back to 1996, however, in England, the NHS Chief Executive, in a letter dated the 31 July 2007 to his colleagues in the NHS, stated that cases involving eligibility decisions made before April 2004 should be raised by 30 November 2007. It was intended that this cut off was to be effectively communicated to the population but it would appear few people either knew about the availability of NHS Continuing Healthcare Funding and/or the cut off for retrospective claims involving periods before April 2004. The Chief Executive did say the NHS was not ruling out that there may be exceptional circumstances that mean some cases for periods before April 2004 will still need to dealt with but he did not give any indication as to what those exceptional circumstances might be.

In Wales, the Welsh assembly announced on the 30th July 2009 that new claims for refunds for Care Costs where the person should have been receiving NHS Continuing Healthcare funding would be accepted for periods before April 2003 if the claim was not made by 4 December 2009.

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