Accident and Emergency
This is often the first point of contact a patient will have with the NHS due to an illness or after an injury. The staff who practise in emergency medicine have skills in prevention, diagnosis and management.
Case reports
T -v- Calderdale & Huddersfield NHS Trust
The Claimant was taken to the Accident & Emergency Department at Calderdale Royal Infirmary after being knocked down by a car
and was diagnosed as having an unstable short spiral fracture of the right femur. Her leg was placed in a splint which had to be re-applied because it was the wrong size. She was admitted to the children’s ward of the hospital. She remained in hospital but there was a failure to monitor the healing process of her leg in the splint, to the extent that poor union of the femur was achieved and her leg was bent when the bone was healed and had a boney protruberance. The bowing of the leg also entailed shortening of the femur and consequently the leg itself.
The case settled for £28,000.00 which included damages for care provided to the Claimant by her parents, the cost of some reconstructive surgery on her scarring and damages for her psychological distress, as well as for the leg injuries overall and for the otherwise would have been unnecessary.
John Pickering and Partners Solicitors LLP urge Coalition Government to drop plans to end Legal Aid for Clinical Negligence claims
Friday, 19 November 2010 12:54 | 
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The coalition Government this week announced plans in a Green Paper to withdraw legal aid from a number of areas of law, including all clinical negligence cases. They also announced their intention to consider allowing some of the costs of litigation to be taken out of compensation paid to injured people, an idea suggested by Lord Justice Jackson in a recent review of all types of litigation. John Pickering and Partners LLP urge the Government to re-think these plans and to protect the needs of people injured by clinical negligence.
Claire Horton, Head of the specialist clinical negligence team at John Pickering and Partners LLP said:
“There is a myth being spread about that the numbers of clinical negligence cases in this country are rising, whereas in fact they have remained largely similar over the past few years. The costs to the tax payer of helping people with these claims via legal aid has also been stable and well controlled for a number of years and in fact such costs are relatively small. Any increase in costs which has occurred in recent years has been solely caused by the increase in the number of clinical negligence cases run on a conditional fee basis, which is the method the Government now suggests should be used instead of legal aid in all clinical negligence cases.”
Conditional fee arrangements increase overall costs in clinical negligence cases because they add in an element of profit which goes to insurance companies, whose involvement is necessary where injured people are without the protection of legal aid. Conditional Fee arrangements also allow solicitors to charge higher fees (success fees) because of the risk of taking on cases which might not win. The coalition Government is now saying that both these types of additional costs should come out of clients’ compensation. This will come at a time when it is widely known that monies paid to clients for future care and other needs will not be sufficient to meet the actual costs. This is because inflation is not currently sufficiently taken into account in the calculations about compensation made by the Courts.
Claire Horton went on to say:
“It is also an absolute myth to portray legal aid solicitors as “fat cat lawyers”, as costs in the legal aid system in clinical negligence have been heavily controlled for a long time now. The hourly rate paid for legal aid work is substantially less than that for private work and solicitors pursue cases under the legal aid system at present because it protects the client. Legal aid hourly rates are not profitable but where solicitors win a case assisted by legal aid they obtain payment for their fees from the losing Defendant, at a commercial hourly rate, which is profitable. Conditional fee arrangements give greater profits to solicitors out of all the currently available methods of funding.”
If legal aid is withdrawn, the actual effect of this will not be to reduce solicitors’ profits but will reduce compensation paid to injured people and mean that some solicitors and insurance companies will only take on easy to win cases. There is also concern that some solicitors and insurance companies may put pressure on clients to settle their claims at an under-value to protect their own profits.
Claire Horton added:
“Currently, using legal aid, I am able to represent adults who have lost their livelihood and children who have been so injured by clinical negligence that they will require 24 hour care for life. Without the help of legal aid, some of these people may not be able to bring a claim at all and others will have their compensation significantly reduced. This will reduce such injured people and their families to the levels of abject poverty and distress which unrelieved care needs entail. Successful litigation, supported by legal aid for injuries caused through clinical negligence currently helps alleviate this.”
We urge the Government to listen to The Law Society and to organisations such as AvMA (action against medical accidents) and APIL (Association of Personal Injury Lawyers). They are making objective and practical suggestions about clinical negligence and how to protect injured people and the compensation they need by keeping legal aid, but looking at alternative ways to fund it where necessary.
FURTHER INFORMATION :
NOTES
The Green Paper
The Ministry of Justice produced a Green Paper entitled “Proposals for the Reform of Legal Aid in England and Wales” a consultation paper CP12/10 dated November 2010 and published on 16th November 2010.
Lord Justice Jackson
Lord Justice Jackson produced a 610 page report for the Government on 14th January 2010 looking at litigation costs in the last 10 years. It said that “Facing a full adverse costs order is likely to be a disaster for most ordinary citizens.” Website : www.justice.gov.uk.
AvMA (action against medical accidents)
AvMA is an independent charity which helps people who have been injured by clinical negligence to achieve redress. It has published its own press release in response to the Government’s proposals which can be found on its website www.avma.org.uk.
The Law Society
The Law Society is the representative body for solicitors in England and Wales. This includes solicitors who act for Claimants and also solicitors who act for Defendants in clinical negligence cases. The Law Society responded to the legal aid Green Paper on Tuesday 16th November 2010, requesting that “access to justice must not be sacrificed, following the announcement of the Government’s legal aid proposals” and their response can be found on The Law Society website www.lawsociety.org.uk in the news section.
APIL (Association of Personal Injury Lawyers)
APIL is an organisation which exists to help its members fight for the rights of injured people and has developed to assist the promotion, encouragement and development of expertise in personal injury law. It published its own statement about the Ministry of Justice proposals on 15th November 2010 which can be found on the APIL website: www.apil.org.uk.
John Pickering and Partners LLP is a specialist clinical negligence practice, with 2 offices in the North West of England and one in Yorkshire. We were established in 1979. Our offices are in Manchester, Liverpool and in Halifax, West Yorkshire. The clinical negligence department specialises in difficult, high value and challenging cases carried out by senior specialised solicitors. The department has grown from 1 to 3 specialised solicitors in the last year. Our clients can be sure that the specialised solicitors do not delegate the work to inexperienced fee earners, but have the day to day conduct of matters. This approach runs throughout the firm and contributed to the recent firm-wide successes in being awarded prizes as winners of personal injury team of the year in the Liverpool and Yorkshire Law Society Legal Awards 2009. Our Manchester office was also short-listed for the Manchester Law Society Awards 2009 at the first awards ceremony in this category.
The main theme in the clinical negligence department in the last 12 months has been of development in line with the firm’s ethos, i.e. dealing with technically complex high quantum claims always handled by senior specialised solicitors. The team has been enhanced by the addition of Rachel Donovan, a full time experienced clinical negligence specialist. Ruth Davies, a partner and an experienced personal injury litigator, is now also working in the clinical negligence department.
Both Claire Horton and Rachel Donovan devote all their practice to clinical negligence work. Ruth Davies now works both in the clinical negligence and disease departments. The firm retains a Legal Aid franchise based at the Manchester office but acts for clients throughout the country.
The addition of Rachel Donovan to the clinical negligence team has helped to further increase our Liverpool presence and demonstrates the underlying commitment of the firm to develop the much respected clinical negligence aspect of its work. The additional work provided by Ruth Davies has also helped to boost our Halifax presence. The firm, which has long had a significant national presence in asbestos litigation, has shown its commitment to expanding the additional specialism of its clinical negligence work, by the employment of further experienced specialists.
The firm continues to have a Legal Aid franchise in clinical negligence and is committed to the process of tendering for future work in legally aided clinical negligence.
The commitment of the firm to quality in all aspect of its work, including the clinical negligence department, is demonstrated by its success in the regional personal injury awards.
We continue to act only for Claimants and we undertake to represent clients with difficult but important cases, whose claims give rise to issues of importance to the wider public.