Justice4NHS campaign steps up with application for permission to appeal to Supreme Court
Update: In May 2019, the Supreme Court refused our application for permission to appeal. So that was the end of the road for our legal challenge – and the start of a new phase of the #NHS4All campaign.
999 Call for the NHS has applied to the Supreme Court for expedited Permission to Appeal the recent ruling against our legal challenge to the contentious new cost-cutting Integrated Care Provider NHS contract.
We feel compelled to step up the #Justice4NHS campaign in this way, because rulings from the High Court and the Court of Appeal have not addressed or answered our essential complaints about the legality of the NHS England’s proposed Integrated Care Provider contract (formerly called the Accountable Care Organisation contract).
We thought at the Court of Appeal all sides of the argument would be carefully listened to and examined, in order to reach a properly informed and unbiased judgement.
But the Court of Appeal Judges were selective about which bits of our argument they chose to to pay attention to.
This made a mockery of the whole purpose of going to court.
We hope the Supreme Court will recognise the public interest in properly examining the key issue of whether NHS services can lawfully be paid for without “visible prices fixed in advance for each individual treatment episode.”
Because paying for a vast range of NHS services for a whole area through a contract that doesn’t guarantee to cover the actual cost of each individual treatment for each patient, creates a real risk that it wouldn’t be possible to provide high quality treatments to all patients who have a clinical need for them.
The 999 Call for the NHS press release about our application for permission to the Supreme Court is downloadable here.
We owe huge thanks to everyone who has donated to cover the costs of the Judicial Review and Court of Appeal hearing. Your generosity means we have enough money left over from those stages of our legal challenge so we do not need to launch a new stage of our CrowdJustice crowdfunder.
