CXB v North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust [2019] EWHC 2053 (QB) There is no general principle that the courts should prefer assertions contained in clinical records over factual accounts in witness evidence. That was the view of His Honour Judge Gore QC (sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge), rejecting the Defendant’s submission based […]
Read More… from Clinical records do not necessarily trump lay evidence
In this article Simon Fox QC reviews the Bolam test for breach of duty in clinical negligence in the light of recent case law and asks – is it still the test for breach? Since I transferred from medicine to law 25 years ago, I have always thought that the Bolam test cannot logically apply […]
Liverpool Victoria Insurance Company Limited v Dr Asef Zafar [2019] EWCA 392 (Civ) and George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust v Elder (2019), QBD, 5.4.2019 Introduction Dr Zafar ran his own medico-legal company, producing over 500 expert reports a year. In February 2012, he examined Mr Iqbal 11 weeks after a road traffic accident. The other […]
The short answer is no but feel free to keep reading. In Pomphrey v Secretary of State for Health the Claimant’s claim for damages in respect of the non-negligent complications of spinal surgery failed. His argument was that for a period of 10 months prior to surgery he had symptoms of cauda equina syndrome and […]
Read More… from Complications of spinal surgery – has Pomphrey changed anything?
R (Chidlow) v HM Coroner for Blackpool and Fylde & Others [2019] EWHC 581 (Admin) Human bodies being such complex things it is unsurprising medical causation is often extremely complicated. Legal causation of medical injury is a minefield for clinical negligence lawyers to navigate: “indivisible injuries”, “multifactorial causation”, “material contribution”, “loss of a chance”, etc. […]
Read More… from Considering the Consequences of Delay when Cause of Death is Unknown: