The claimant challenged a refusal by the Authority to provide medical care of the sort requested.
Held: Lord Bingham said: ‘I have no doubt that in a perfect world any treatment which a patient, or a patient’s family, sought would be provided if doctors were willing to give it, no matter how much it costs, particularly when a life was potentially at stake. It would however, in my view, be shutting one’s eyes to the real world if the court were to proceed on the basis that we do live in such a world. It is common knowledge that health authorities of all kinds are constantly pressed to make ends meet. They cannot pay their nurses as much as they would like; they cannot provide all the treatments they would like; they cannot purchase all the extremely expensive medical equipment they would like; they cannot carry out all the research they would like; they cannot build all the hospitals and specialist units they would like. Difficult and agonising judgments have to be made as to how a limited budget is best allocated to the maximum advantage of the maximum number of patients. That is not a judgment which the court can make. In my judgment, it is not something that a health authority such as this authority can be fairly criticised for not advancing before the court.’
Sir Thomas Bingham MR, Stephen Brown P, Simon Brown LJ
[1995] EWCA Civ 49, [1995] Fam Law 480, [1995] 6 Med LR 250, [1995] 1 FLR 1056, [1995] 2 FCR 485, [1995] 2 All ER 129, [1995] COD 407, [1995] 1 WLR 898
Bailii
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – AC v Berkshire West Primary Care Trust, Equality and Human Rights Commissions intervening Admn 25-May-2010
ac_berkshireAdmn10
The claimant, a male to female transsexual, challenged a decision by the respondent to refuse breast augmentation treatment. The Trust had a policy ‘GRS is a Low Priority treatment due to the limited evidence of clinical effectiveness and is not . .
Cited – Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust v James SC 30-Oct-2013
The hospital where a gravely ill man had been treated had asked for a declaration that it would be in his best interests to withhold certain life-sustaining treatments from him. When can it be in the best interests of a living patient to withhold . .
These lists may be incomplete.
Updated: 02 June 2021; Ref: scu.416729