This Update contains brief details of recent Government publications, legislation, cases and other developments relevant to those involved in health and social care work, which have been published in the last month.
Olwen Dutton, Local Government Partner has been named Partner of the year 2013 by the Birmingham Law Society.
At the award ceremony on Thursday 14 March, the judges indicated that they were impressed with the way that she had developed her career, moving from a prominent local government position, to become a leading private practice lawyer dealing with local authority issues.
This Update contains brief details of recent Government publications, legislation, cases and other developments relevant to those involved in health and social care work, which have been published in the last month.
In
Lockwood v Department of Work and Pensions, the Employment Appeal Tribunal has confirmed that an enhanced redundancy payment for older workers did not amount to direct age discrimination, when objectively justified by a strong social policy objective. In this case, the strong social policy objective was the provision of a 'financial cushion' for older workers that reflected the extra difficulties they experienced after losing their jobs. George Pennington explains more.
As 1 April 2013 approaches and CCGs receive their authorisation, it is important for all CCGs to focus on what they need to do now to ensure they are able to be effective from inception. There is already a wealth of advice available from various sources, including the NHS Commissioning Board and the BMA. This article outlines some of the key areas of legal significance.
The Francis report makes challenging reading for commissioners. It is clear that although the successive reforms to the NHS may have amounted to mitigating circumstances, the commissioners, and indeed other interested parties, failed to take adequate steps to prevent the problems at Mid Staffordshire, or to uncover and prevent them from continuing. The report recognises that the system is on the cusp of change but “the experience of Stafford shows an urgent need to rebalance and refocus commissioning into an exercise designed to procure desired standards of service for patients as well as to identify the nature of the service to be provided”.
This Update contains brief details of recent Government publications, legislation, cases and other developments relevant to those involved in health and social care work, which have been published in the last month.
This Update contains brief details of recent Government publications, legislation, cases and other developments relevant to those involved in health and social care work, which have been published in the last month.
The Report of the Laidlaw Inquiry dated 6 December 2012 sets out lessons learnt for the DfT from the collapsed InterCity West Coast Competition. In our previous alert Procurement - evaluation processes off the rails, which followed the cancellation of the competition, we set out our view on why procurement processes can go wrong and basic principles on how to get it right. Unsurprisingly (to us) the Laidlaw Report mirrors our own experience of what public bodies need to consider when procuring complex contracts.
This Update contains brief details of recent Government publications, legislation, cases and other developments relevant to those involved in health and social care work, which have been published in the last month.