Who may refuse treatment?

The Court dismissed an appeal by the Official Solicitor acting on behalf of T, an unconscious female patient, from a decision of Mr Justice Ward, sitting at Nottingham on 14 July, that it was lawful for the doctors responsible for her care to administer blood to her in the circumstances that had arisen. Doctors faced with an adult patient's refusal to consent to proposed treatment had to consider the basis of that refusal, whether the patient had capacity at that time to make it and whether the decision was the patient's own, or made under external pressure.