Case studies

Mental health law

Examples of our work in this area

• We gave the initial advice to the South West London & St George’s Mental Health Trust that ongoing detention by the trust of a patient under the MHA was lawful. The Court of Appeal agreed when dismissing the Habeus Corpus application brought by the patient. The importance of this case is that the patient refused to cooperate in an assessment interview and argued that there was no proper detention as a result. If the patient had succeeded it would mean that patients could never be detained if they refused to cooperate.
• We advised Oxfordshire County Council and Oxfordshire & Bucks Partnership NHS Trust that the hospital had acted lawfully when not discharging a patient and was entitled to rely upon the displacement of the nearest relative proceedings brought by the County Council even though were later found to be defective. The Court agreed with that advice.
• We represented Merseycare NHS Trust in the Court of Appeal that decided that confidential clinical information given to a journalist did not have sufficient confidentiality and personal information attached to it, to enable the trust to discover from the recipient of this information, who gave such to him. It was held that the clinical information was insufficiently personal to overturn the presumption that sources of journalists should remain confidential. In other words, confidentiality of sources trumped confidentiality of clinical data. This is now the leading authority on this.