Family receives over £100,000 in wrongly paid care home fees
22 | 09 | 2011
After a 5 year fight with the help
of Hugh James Nursing Care, the Bury family have now received over
£100,000 in wrongly paid fees.
Mrs Bury was admitted from her home
in Warminster in Wiltshire to Bath Royal Hospital in July 2002
following a fall. After a period in hospital, the family were told
that she could not return home and she was discharged to Broadway
Lodge Care Home in Surrey on the 11th April 2003. Due to Mrs Bury’s
capital, the family were told that she would need to meet the full
cost of her care fees.
Allison and David Bury, who live in
Stoughton, Surrey called the experience challenging NHS decisions
‘an absolute nightmare’ and that they paid from £600 to £700 per
week for nursing home care.
Mrs Bury suffered with Alzheimer’s
disease, as a result of her illness, she was agitated, totally
confused and disorientated in time and place, she was aggressive
and was resistive to care. She was unsteady on her feet and
suffered falls which resulted in her fracturing her right femur in
May 2004 and left femur in November 2005. She was doubly
incontinent, blind, deaf and unable to communicate. In August 2005,
Broadway Lodge Care Home could no longer cope with Mrs Bury’s needs
so she was transferred to Jubilee House Care Home in Godalming in
Surrey where she remained until she died in August 2006.
In August 2005, Hugh James Nursing
Care on behalf of the family first requested a NHS Continuing
Healthcare assessment and a retrospective review from the date that
Mrs Bury entered a care home in April 2003.
In 2010, a complaint was made to
the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman who concluded that
Mr Bury had not received a reasonable review and that the Primary
Care Trust should undertake an urgent review of the case.
This year, the Primary Care Trust
reconsidered the case and after a 5 year fight agreed that Mrs Bury
had been eligible for NHS Continuing Healthcare from April 2004.
The Primary Care Trust has now reimbursed the estate over £100,000
in wrongly paid care fees.
Lisa Morgan, Partner and nursing
care specialist at law firm Hugh James, said “We spent over five
years working with the Bury family to battle against decisions made
on continuing care payments that were clearly wrong.”
“It has taken a long time but I am
pleased that the family have now been reimbursed the money that
they were entitled to. If the Primary Care Trust had undertaken a
full assessment in compliance with the correct guidance and the
law, the family would not have had to endure this complex
system”
Hugh James are the leading national
experts in the recovery of wrongly paid care home fees. The nursing
care department has successfully recovered over £20 million to
date.
Read more about Mrs Bury's case