Patients will have a legal right to hospital treatment within 12 weeks and to complain about the standard of their care, under new laws unveiled by Scottish ministers.

Patients will be promised six new rights to NHS treatment as Gordon Brown attempts to relaunch his flagging premiership.

David Cameron has pledged that under a Conservative government patients going into hospital for an operation or a course of treatment would be able to choose an individual named consultant A Conservative government would give patients the right to choose an individual named consultant for an operation or course of hospital treatment, David Cameron said today. Under current NHS rules in England, pa...

Patients will travel for the best hospital treatment and accept major NHS changes if it improves care, a body representing health boards claims.

My Yers are bleeding listening to this shite! NHS Constitutions Patients and the public – your rights and NHS pledges to you: Everyone who is entitled to use the NHS should understand what legal rights they have. For this reason, important rights are summarised in this Constitution and explained in more detail in the Handbook to the NHS Constitution, which also explains what you can do if yo...

Paul Blomfield, Labour's Parliamentary Candidate for Sheffield Central, has welcomed new legal rights for patients that will come into effect in 2010. The two new rights for all patients coming in from April 2010 are: the right to see a cancer specialist within 2 weeks if your GP suspects you may have cancer, and the right that all treatment, for any illness, should be within 18 weeks of a re...

The NHS now has the shortest waits since its records began, Labour Health Secretary Alan Johnson announced today. New data shows that in Southampton and across England the NHS has met its target to treat patients within a maximum of 18 weeks from referral by their GP – an achievement which was unimaginable 12 years ago. Alan Whitehead, the Labour MP for Southampton Test, said: "This is a tre...

Patients will be given the legal right to free private health treatment paid for by the NHS under plans to be announced in the next Queen's Speech.

Good news in the NHS, where patients will be allowed to top-up their free treatment by paying for drugs the NHS won’t fund. Previously patients who chose to go private would be denied any NHS treatment. If the extra they found for treatments the NHS couldn’t afford wasn’t enough to cover the whole cost of

Fewer patients paid out of their own pocket for private hospital treatment last year as NHS waiting times fell and the economy began to falter