CHILD WITH CEREBRAL PALSY

You can claim compensation for a child with cerebral palsy if the condition occurred as a result of medical negligence. But exactly what is negligence? It occurs when one person, who owes another a duty of care, breaches that duty which results in reasonably foreseeable harm. In English law, the following basic judicial definition exists: “negligence is the omission to do something which a reasonable man, guided upon those considerations which ordinarily regulate the conduct of human affairs, would do, or doing something which a prudent and reasonable man would not do.”

So, if a medical practitioner has failed to provide your child with adequate care, if they were careless, unskilled or ignored or forgot rules and regulations governing care and your child was harmed as a result, then medical negligence may be indicated. Hospitals and healthcare trusts and medical professionals are under an obligation to compensate a child with cerebral palsy if their staff, and this includes nurses and technicians as well as doctors, have been negligent.

Let’s recap. Medical negligence arises when a health care provider falls short of the standards expected of them or of the ‘reasonable man’. So it’s necessary to show that what the healthcare provider did was substandard given the expectations we have for a reasonable, competent individual doing their job correctly. If the healthcare provider can show that what they did would have been reasonable for any competent practitioner to do, then they may be able to defend against the claim. A judge is therefore required to hear evidence from specialist medical personnel and consider whether the actions of the person or persons accused of being negligent were correct. Sometimes this decision will be difficult: in medicine there are often several accepted ways for attaining the same objective and negligence may not follow if an alternative method was chosen to that which another expert would choose. In other words, even if an identically qualified individual had to make the same decision, their different choice, which may have failed, does not necessarily imply negligence.

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