Injury Compensation News

Controller and Auditor General has revealed that payments made under the Garda Siochana Compensation Acts for injury compensation claims amounted to 12 million euro in 2009. The highest award to a Garda was €132,000.  Civilians injuried in accidents on Garda premises are entitled to receive compensation under the act and six civilians shared compensation of €48,000. The Controller and Auditor General has also reported that compensation and legal costs of over €3m were paid out in 2009 for accidents involving grada squad cars. The payments were made for 280 cases that resulted from 532 accidents, with payments ranging from €2 to €250,000.  Prisoners and civilians visiting prisons are entitled to compensation. Prison staff injured while on duty received €682,000, with the highest payment being €73,000. Some 83 prisoners received compensation for injuries while an seemingly very high number of civilians – 26 – were hurt while visiting jails and claimed compensation.

The State Claims Agency has already paid out 20% more in compensation in the first eight months of the year compared with the whole of the 2009. The State Claims Agency had already paid compensation of €59.9 million up to August 2010, compared with total compensation payments of €48 million in 2009.  At the current rate,  the Agency will make compensation payments of nearly €90 million in 2010.  This represents an increase in compensation of nearly 50% in 2010 compared with 2009.

The Minister for Health, Mary Harney, has announced some measures to improve patient safety.  The most significant are draft healthcare standards developed by the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa), which has now entered into a public consultation phase.

Minster Harney has said that about 10% of people admitted to hospital experienced an ‘adverse event’, and about 1% of the adverse events would result in injury or death.  Speaking about the adverse events, the minister said “Many of them are systemic failings and many of them are avoidable”.

It should also be pointed out that although the rate of adverse events in HSE run hospitals is particularly high, the HSE is not always responsible, such as the recent DePuy recall.

The Health and Safety Authority (HSA)  has launched new farm safety guidelines with the support of farming organisations. Farms are the most dangerous workplaces in Ireland in terms of fatal accidents. The focus of the HSA’s efforts are to help farmers identify and negate the key risks and hazards in farms. For example, it is not generally known that farm animals are one of the main causes of farm deaths. The new farm safety initiative includes an improved code of practice for child safety on farms, guidelines on the safe use of tractors, guidance on safety around overhead power lines, and guidance on livestock safety at marts and lairages. The objective is to reduce the number of farm accidents.

A jury at the coroner’s court returned a verdict of death by “medical accident” in the case of Louise Butler at the Mid Western Regional Hospital in Limerick on November 16th, 2006 from a large subarachnoid haemorrhage, one month after she was mistakenly diagnosed with a migraine.

The wrong diagnosis occurred despite the family of the 21-year-old victim repeatedly requesting a brain scan.

The Jury has recommended that patients who present at hospitals with persistent and severe headaches should receive Cat scans  as soon as possible.

The Health and Safety Executive had already apologised in the High Court in July during proceedings and also made  a compensation payment to the family of Louise Butler.

The Health Service Executive (HSE) has announced that 3,516 patients in Ireland made need corrective surgery for faulty hip replacement device made by DePuy Orthopaedics, unit of Johnson & Johnson.  There are nearly 100,000 people worldwide fitted with the device.

However, data from the UK reveals that about one in eight people using the device may have problems, which implies that perhaps about 400 patient may require corrective surgery in Ireland (replacement of the faulty device).

The  specific products affected by the problem are ASR XL Acetabular System and the DePuy ASR Hip Resurfacing System, both of which are no longer manufactured.

DePuy Orthopaedics has already said it would cover the cost of corrective surgery in any patients affected in Ireland.  However, DePuy Orthopaedics has attached conditions to the offer- providing full medical records and returning the removed faulty hip device (presumably for analysis).

There is still no indication of what type of compensation scheme DePuy Orthopaedics will be offering. Meanwhile, the HSE is also negotiating the issue of medical costs with DePuy Orthopaedics.

Any victim that needs to undergo corrective surgery would be very unwise to sign any sort of legally binding agreement with DuPuy Orthopaedics without first seeking independent legal advice.  It would be unwise to sign an agreement that puts the key medical evidence under the control of DuPuy Orthopaedics prior to any potential compensation litigation.

It should be pointed out that the HSE is clearly not responsible for the faulty products, which it used in good faith.  It is highly unlikely that any court would find any surgeons or HSE-owned hospital guilty of medical negligence.

For more detail, and to read about making DePuy Compensation Claims click here.

A Medical Council fitness-to-practice committee ruling has attracted significant media comment over the past few days in the case involving the removal of the wrong kidney from a young child. After hearing most of the evidence in the case, the committee had decided to invoke Section 67 of the Medical Practitioners Act 2007 that allows doctors to undertake not to repeat their errors while avoiding being found guilty of professional misconduct. The incident occurred at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, Dublin, in March 2008 when junior doctor Sri Paran, under the supervision of Professor Martin Corbally, removed a perfectly healthy kidney while leaving in place a barely functioning kidney.

The young boys’ parents, Jennifer Stewart and Oliver Conroy, repeatedly asked hospital staff to confirm which kidney was scheduled to be removed before the operation.  Despite this, it was revealed that nobody had reviewed the X-rays that were available in the operating theatre before the operation. The boy, now 8 years old, is left with a right kidney with 9 per cent functionality, leaving him requiring regular dialysis until he obtains a kidney transplant.

Professor Corbally immediately met with the parents of the boy and apologised.

This type of medical error happens all the time as is known as a “wrong-site operation”.  The problem is mainly due to poor procedures in operating theatre, where surgeons seem to resist the ‘checklist’ approach to operations that are common in other professions.  A good example is the pre-flight checklist used by all pilots all over the world, where they check even the most obvious things like fuel levels and radio signals.

Since there were no proper checklists in place for a kidney removal operation, there was no medical malpractice resulting from not following the non-existent checklist.  It was a simple case of human error.

There has been much commentary in the media about the new Health Services Executive (HSE) chief executive Cathal Magee facing a difficult first year implementing significant budget cuts. However, he also has a significant challenge changing the internal staff culture of the HSE, which was most recently criticised by the Ombudsman for its “rotten culture of secrecy” when dealing with medical malpractice.

Cathal Magree should start by reading the paper in August 17th issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine about a program launched by the University of Michigan Health System that encouraged health workers to report medical mistakes. The program included a procedure for telling victims about errors, who exactly made the error, what steps were made to prevent similar mistakes in the future, and mostly importantly, making a sincere apology to the patient or family. The procedure also included a process for offering fair compensation.

Reporting and explaining errors honestly to patients obviously leads to faster resolution of disputes, but also reduced the number of lawsuits by 36%.