Anita Rao

Anita is an experienced health and social care barrister, who has worked with the NHS, wider healthcare, and social care clients for over 10 years. She specialises in all aspects of advisory law, in particular:

• Mental capacity – from advance decisions, LPAs and non-contested deprivation of liberty applications, to complex contested Court of Protection cases including serious medical treatment applications
• Mental health – including its interaction with capacity, decision making for patients under the Mental Health Act, and Tribunal proceedings
• Decision making in relation to children and young people – including wardship, consent, withdrawal of care and safeguarding
• Judicial review, and public law, across a range of health, social care and regulatory decisions
• NHS clinical governance and funding disputes – including NHS commissioning frameworks and responsibilities, Continuing Healthcare and Children’s Continuing Care
• NHS service change, duties of public involvement and consultation; and
• CQC regulation of health and social care providers – from registration, to preparation for inspection, and challenges to decisions made.

Anita was called to the Bar in 2011, and practised at the self-employed Bar as a family and Court of Protection specialist for several years. She has appeared extensively in the Court of Protection, High Court (Family and Administrative Divisions), and the Family Court, including on appeal on complex points of law. Anita has appeared as counsel in the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, and her reported cases include Re D (A Child) [2019] UKSC 42, and Re Y (Children) [2016] EWCA Civ 1091.

Anita was Judicial Assistant to Lady Arden (then Lady Justice Arden) in the Court of Appeal in 2014, and was separately selected to be the Pegasus Scholar to the European Court of Human Rights in 2018. She is a co-author of Surrogacy: Law, Practice and Policy.

Main areas of Expertise

• mental capacity (including Court of Protection)
• social care
• children and young people
• NHS continuing healthcare
• NHS commissioning decisions
• public law and judicial review

The clients she works with

• NHS acute, mental health and foundation trusts
• NHS commissioning bodies
• social care providers – care home and domiciliary
• independent providers of health and social care

Qualifications

• Bar Vocational Course (Inns of Court School of Law) (2011)
• Postgraduate Diploma in Law (City University) (2010)
• BA Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Oxford University) (2009)

More about Anita

Anita has always been keen to support and train the next generation of lawyers, and to improve access to law from underrepresented groups. She can often be found sitting on interview panels for trainee/NQ lawyers and for Inns of Court Bar scholarships, has previously sat on chambers’ pupillage committees, and participated in outreach programmes being run by the Inns of Court. Anita very much enjoys reading about what the students and young lawyers who have benefitted from that work have gone on to do.

Aside from this, Anita spends her time being a working mum to two lovely girls, finding the occasional moment to go walking, hiking and running, and (even more occasionally) travelling.