Patient Voice Committee
Focus: eliminating discrimination against medical cannabis patients by championing their rights, promoting institutional awareness, and ensuring patient-led, legally compliant policies across all sectors.
Key Topics: legal rights of CBPM patients, institutional training and awareness, discrimination and stigma, Equality Act compliance, safe access to medication, and patient-led policy advocacy.
Priorities
Institutional Awareness and Training
Challenge: Widespread ignorance of the 2018 legal change across the police, judiciary, housing officers, NHS staff, education services, and other frontline professionals has led to unlawful arrests, discrimination, and professional negligence.
Priority:
Implement mandatory, evidence-based training on the legal status and use of CBPMs (Cannabis-Based Prescription Medicines) for all relevant council employees, police, NHS, housing officers, and school staff.
Ensure training distinguishes between CBPMs and illicit cannabis, highlights Equality Act obligations, and addresses the realities of prescription usage, including methods of administration like vaping.
Equality, Access, and Safe Accommodation
Challenge: Patients prescribed CBPMs are often denied appropriate spaces to medicate, refused their medication while in custody, or threatened with eviction—contravening the Equality Act 2010.
Priority:
Ensure all council premises and affiliated services provide safe, discreet indoor areas for CBPM patients to medicate, equivalent to how other medications are handled.
Issue clear guidelines to housing associations, schools, and NHS services about non-discrimination and reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act.
Proactive Stakeholder Communication
Challenge: Reactive attitudes and lack of coordinated messaging among councils, police, NHS trusts, and housing bodies contribute to policy failure and patient harm.
Priority:
Engage proactively with stakeholders through formal letters, published inquiries, and inter-agency meetings to confirm current policy and training practices.
Publish responses to increase transparency and accountability, and to promote consistent implementation of best practices across sectors.
