All credit to original authors and posters.
What is the elephant in the room of clinical negligence?
Do timings matter in birth injury cases?
They do as in the professional comment above about the importance of timings in causality. It can and does make a difference to the outcome.
As families, we often disagree with medical notes relating to our child’s birth. In my circumstances, the hospital had on record that I attended early afternoon. In reality, we were there before 10 am supported by my husband’s workplace when he left to take me in, my phone records – on the phone to a friend on the way in, and our collective memory of the time and circumstances. It could be a simple clerical error of when a particular staff member first saw me, who knows? It didn’t make a difference to my case, BUT in some cases, it can be the difference between a successful claim or no claim. Ultimately the breach of care causing damage to my child was discovered to have happened 10 days earlier and not on the actual day of birth as discovered during my litigation.
Interestingly the above case went to the Court of Appeal and was a successful appeal against findings of facts.