Blog
Rayner my parade! The importance of specialist advice.
Jemma Brimblecombe
17 June 2015
Birth injuries series - Fetal distress
Some birth injuries can be anticipated and with prompt and appropriate action serious injuries can sometimes be avoided. If a birth injury is sustained through lack of appropriate care it may be possible to make a clinical negligence claim for compensation.
The focus of this blog is fetal distress and it is the second in our series of six birth injury blogs.
This article first appeared in At Home Magazine.
3 June 2015
Melanoma - diagnosis and treatment
This week brings the start of meteorological summer and the twin temptations of sunny skies and warmer temperatures invite us to indulge in lazy days on the beach, picnics in the park and barbeques in our gardens. However, the advent of better weather brings with it increasing UV exposure, which is the main preventable cause of skin cancer.
20 May 2015
Treating with dignity
No-one could fail to be moved by the accounts given in “Dying Without Dignity” the report on the end of life care just published by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. It is a sad reflection of the very patchy nature of the NHS. In some cases, it seems, end of life care epitomises the dehumanisation of health care. The emphasis on process rather than compassion is very clear from the case studies. In one of them, Mrs N is quoted and her complaint is familiar.
6 May 2015
The duty to explain risks to patients: a new exposition on consent from the Supreme Court
The recent unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board [2015] UKSC 11 makes it clear that the older case law based on medical paternalism and the assumption that patients are uninformed and incapable of understanding medical matters is now untenable. Access to information, the context in which medical practitioners operate and the way in which recipients of healthcare services view their relationship with practitioners has changed and this decision presents a change in the law on consent which is welcomed by Kingsley Napley’s Healthcare Standards initiative.
9 April 2015
Haemophilia and hepatitis compensation
David Cameron recently made a public apology in the House of Commons for what was called “the worst treatment disaster in the history of Britain’s public healthcare”.
He was referring to a period in the 1970s and early 1980s in which the NHS did not have a proper screening programme for obtaining blood products, which were often taken from high risks donors, such as prostitutes and intravenous drug users. As a consequence blood products became infected with HIV and Hepatitis C, and over 7,000 people, many of them haemophiliacs, went on to contract HIV and Hepatitis after being given contaminated blood products during the course of their treatment. Approximately 2,000 of those patients went on to die.