To have negligence admitted 3 facts must be established:
- Duty of care
- Breach of that duty/breach of care
- Causality
Duty of Care – Put simply, the person delivering the care must provide a reasonable level of care. Trust automatically owes the child a duty of care.
Breech of care – The standard of care fell below that which a reasonable practitioner would have given and the failure to give that standard of care resulted in harm
Causality – damage that is caused by the breach, and which is foreseeable.
All three parts of the ‘chain of causation’ must be present and proven for a successful case. In our experience, there can be appalling cases of breach of care yet no causality is proven.
Often after a letter of claim has been sent in by a legal team, The NHS Trust will accept or make admissions in two parts. Breech of care initially and then causality. These can be many months if not years apart.
Sometimes a Trust will only accept partial causality – the best care would still have had some of the same outcome – and agree on a percentage settlement with the family. ie they agreed their breech of care caused some but not all of the damage.