Amy is frequently instructed in cases with complex legal issues. She has a substantial High Court practice. Most of her work involves acting for or against public bodies. She has an academic background in medical law and ethics having completed a masters degree in the field in 2001. Her medical law practice extends into welfare law and includes: 

Mental capacity (including Court of Protection): Acting for all sides in proceedings concerning medical and welfare decisions. Acts in cases concerning adults who lack the capacity to decide for themselves (in the Court of Protection – often heard by Family Division judges sitting as nominated judges of the Court of Protection) and children (under the High Court’s inherent jurisdiction). Frequently instructed by the Official Solicitor.

Medical law issues arising in specific cases and medical ethics: Eg consent; negligence; confidentiality; provision of healthcare and resources; contraception and sterilisation; abortion; medically assisted reproduction; feeding; religious objections to treatment; human organ and tissue donation; treatment of suicidal patients; end of life; PVS etc

Medical law issues generally (eg policy advice)
 
Human rights: All aspects, with particular expertise in Article 5 ECHR (deprivation of liberty) in various contexts including the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards under the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

Public law issues: eg funding for care and treatment; primary care trusts’ responsible commissioner disputes.

Information law: The legal aspects of obtaining, disclosing and withholding information. 

Mental health: Representing all sides in all types of mental health proceedings, including mental health review tribunals, judicial review, habeas corpus and applications to displace nearest relatives.

Professional discipline: Experience includes a four-week Fitness to Practise hearing in the General Medical Council led by Adrian Whitfield QC.

Inquests and inquiries

Overlap with police law: Expertise in the medical and mental health issues which may concern the police.

Re B (A Minor) [2009] 1 FLR 1264, [2009] LS Law Medical 214: Represented a hospital in its application to the High Court for a declaration that treatment could be withheld from a young child if her condition deteriorated.

NHS Trust v Ms D and Mr and Mrs D [2006] 1 FLR 638: Represented the parents of an adult suffering from a terminal neurological condition in the hospital's high profile application to the High Court for a declaration that treatment could be withheld. A supplemental judgment on costs (reported at [2006] Lloyd's Rep Med 193) formed part of the Family Division’s developing case law concerning the practice whereby the NHS trust in such an application pays one half of the Official Solicitor's costs.

Involved with Robert Francis QC and Angus Moon QC in JD v East Berkshire Community Health NHS Trust [2005] 2 AC 373, concerning the duty of care of health professionals, in diagnosing child abuse, to parents who suffer psychiatric injury (when it was heard in the Court of Appeal).

Further unreported examples:

• Advising a police force on an application to obtain the products of an abortion where incest was suspected.
• Advising a charity on the law and its procedures regarding parental consent from overseas parents for procedures carried out on their children in the UK.
• Advising a hospital on its policy of barring offenders (eg including fathers-to-be and visitors) from its maternity wards.
• Acting for a hospital resisting a Crown Court application for a production order for the personnel records of a consultant anaesthetist by the police.

Further unreported examples of hearings before High Court judges (sitting in the High Court and as nominated judges in the Court of Protection):

• On behalf of a hospital, making an urgent out-of-hours application in relation to a baby about to be born to an HIV-positive mother who had refused steps to limit the risk of transmitting the virus.
• On behalf of hospitals, making urgent applications in relation to children (ranging from new-born babies to 17 year olds) of Jehovah’s witness parents requiring blood transfusions.
• Acting in Court of Protection proceedings for the Official Solicitor as litigation friend to a woman with severe schizophrenia and ovarian cancer, for whom clinicians had recommended palliative care only.
• Making an application on behalf of a hospital wishing to carry out an abortion on a Gillick incompetent teenage girl without her parents being informed. 
• Advising and representing a police force in an urgent application to the Court of Protection in relation to an unconscious assault victim. The police wanted a forensic pathologist to examine the patient’s wounds to obtain evidence in relation to the assault. The hospital refused access without a court order. 

Contributor of reports and commentaries to the LS Medical Law Reports.

Author of Chapter 5, “Going to Court”, in Medical Treatment: Decisions and the Law, written by a team of authors at 3 Serjeants’ Inn and edited by Christopher Johnston (Bloomsbury Professional, 2010).
 
Editor of the Medical Treatment: Decisions and the Law companion website. See the link on the left or directly at http://www.3serjeantsinn.com/medical_treatment_decisions_and_the_law