An Individual Funding Request (IFR) is a request to fund, for an individual patient, an intervention or treatment that falls outside existing contracts and commissioning arrangements. This request must be made by an NHS funded clinician (GP, consultant or equivalent autonomous practitioner) who is responsible for overseeing the requested treatment.
Funding requests can be made on the basis of exceptionality – where the patient is suffering from a presenting medical condition for which the CCG has a policy but where the requested treatment has not been agreed to be funded under the policy or rarity and the patient would gain more clinical benefit from the treatment from other with the same diagnosis, or rarity – where a patient has a very rare clinical condition and no commissioning policy exists because the low probability of the condition occurring among the CCG’s population means that an explicit policy is not warranted.
An individual funding request can be made by the clinician treating you if they believe that because your clinical circumstances are exceptional, you may receive benefit from a treatment or service that isn’t routinely offered by the NHS.