Age needs one voice. Now it has:
Age UK is the new force combining Age Concern England and
Help the Aged in England.
Everyone aged over 60 gets free prescriptions and eye tests. You may also be eligible for help towards dental treatment‚ glasses and travel costs to hospital.
Before paying for treatment, ask your dentist, optician or hospital staff for advice. Depending on your circumstances, you could get:
You will qualify if you and/or your partner receive:
If you don’t receive any of these benefits but have a low income, you may still get some help with health costs through the NHS Low Income Scheme. Call Help with Health Costs on 0845 850 1166 or visit the NHS website to find out more and request a form. Or pick one up for a dentist, optician or hospital.
For help with NHS costs, just show your benefit award letter or HC2 or HC3 certificate as proof.
Download the guide More money in your pocket: a guide to claiming benefits for people over pension age (PDF 3 MB)
Download the guide Claiming benefits: a guide for people of working age (PDF 1 MB)
Download the Help with health costs factsheet (PDF 165 KB)
Set your location to see what Age UK offers in your local area.
The NHS Business Services Authority administers the 'Help with health costs' scheme. You can read basic information about the scheme and request benefit forms (HC1 and HC5) on their website.
Downloads
A download is a document (like a research report, a leaflet, or an application form) that can be transferred from our website to your computer. You can download a file, view it on your screen, print it, or save it to your computer.
PDF stands for ‘portable document format’.
Most downloads on this website are PDFs. We use this format to ensure that the document looks the same on everyone’s computer (website pages, by contrast, appear differently depending on how people have set their computer up).
Computers use a program called Adobe Acrobat Reader to download PDFs. If you try clicking on a link to download a PDF and it doesn’t work, you will need to install Adobe Acrobat Reader onto your computer.
The process is quite straightforward and is free.
PDFs cannot be changed. If you need to be able to type into a downloaded document (for example, if we are offering a letter template that you need to put your name on) we will provide it as a Microsoft Word document rather than a PDF. You can then download it, type into it and save it to your computer.
Downloads will open on your computer in a new browser window.
Inside this window (below all your web browser menus), there will be a toolbar with options for you to print or save the document.
Close the browser window to return to the Age UK website.
We have made every effort to make our PDFs accessible to screen readers. Here is an overview of your accessibility options available in Acrobat Reader. Please ensure that you have downloaded the latest version of Acrobat Reader from the Adobe Reader website to ensure that they are included in your version of the programme.
You can use Adobe Reader to read a PDF out loud with the following shortcut keys:
You can also convert a PDF into a web page by following these steps:
You can convert a PDF document into a text file for use with other software and hardware such as Braille printers by opening the PDF and choosing ‘Save as text’ from the File menu.
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