| An NHA member has successfully taken on his local CCG in a what is being described as a “landmark legal case”. Anthony Horwood, who is also a member of Protect Our NHS, a Bristol-based NHS campaign group, brought a successful legal challenge against Bristol’s Clinical Commissioning Group (“CCG”) for failing to put in place proper arrangements for involving patients and the public in their decision making. Lawyers for the CCG initially argued that there were no grounds for the legal claim. But after lawyers for Protect Our NHS, Leigh Day, applied for a judicial review, the CCG’s lawyers wrote again with proposals that have now resolved this legal dispute. Anthony Horwood, who with Hilary Saunders, took the action, said: “This is a significant achievement, and we are very grateful to Rosa Curling and her team at Leigh Day, and to all our supporters who pledged money to enable the legal case to go ahead. We are all potential patients and it is really important that other groups resisting the privatisation of NHS services realise that their CCG has a duty to consult and involve them, not just in decisions about the procurement of a specific service but also in decisions about policies and priorities.” Mike Campbell, Protect Our NHS co-coordinator added: “We brought this action because involving patients and the public is fundamental to the development of more effective health services. We want to know that our money is being spent wisely, especially when so many services are being handed over to private health companies while the NHS is being forced to make savings of Ł20 billion.” “For example, if the public in Bristol had been able to tell NHS managers that they did not trust private health companies and were not willing to travel miles to the Emerson’s Green NHS Treatment Centre run by Care UK, we would not have wasted Ł6 million on an underspend that has been pocketed by Care UK’s shareholders.” |