miracle

How long do you spend buying a pair of shoes? Ten minutes? Five? Fifteen at the most?

What about a bicycle? Perhaps weeks of research followed by 15 minutes in the shop?

Your first home? Months of viewings followed by hours and hours of meticulous research and planning? Maybe you would get some advice: perhaps an estate agent, a mortgage advisor and even a house finder?

You’re spending a lot of money and you’ve got to get it right.

It’s fair to say the bigger the purchase, the longer it takes and the more advice and help you may need.

What if you were purchasing products and resources to support your child’s needs throughout their entire life and for years and years after you were gone? When making your decision you must remember that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity and you can’t return for the shop down the line if the care package doesn’t fit, if the therapies start to unravel or there are holes in the transport and accommodation regimes.

These are the difficult decisions facing the families of children who have suffered brain damage or cerebral palsy because of a preventable mistake.

In response, Jeremy Hunt today put forward proposals for a new system of ‘fast-track’ compensation for children left suffering brain damage or from cerebral palsy as a result of medical errors. He thinks that the new system will help the child. He thinks that the new system will help the parents. He really thinks that the system will also break up what he terms a “compensation culture” in the NHS.
Jeremy Hunt suggests that a system based on the Swedish model of compensation will be cheaper and save money.

It is worth taking a closer look at the Swedish system that is being held up as a shining example. The Swedish system operates in all medical accident cases and not exclusively in the higher value brain injury cases as is being proposed here.

In the Swedish system although about 9,000-10,000 general clinical negligence cases are processed in Sweden annually, compensation is paid in barely half of these cases. Significantly the Swedish system does not claim any expertise in brain injury cases.

In the UK, compensation arising from brain injury is given to cover a child’s needs throughout his or her entire life. In most cases will include provision for a lifetime of:

  • Care
  • Physiotherapy
  • Occupational therapy
  • Speech and language therapy
  • Assistive technology and equipment
  • Transport
  • Appropriate accommodation for the child and their family
  • Special educational needs
  • Loss of earnings
  • Professional costs associated with managing the award of compensation

These are not quick fix issues.

Assessing how a child has been affected by brain damage requires careful expert assessment – Does a child meet milestones in terms of development, will time consuming treatment help – if so how much? Is the person likely to need increased care as their condition develops or as their loved ones are less able to care for them? These are assessments that take time and require expertise.

Perhaps it is helpful to point out what these tragic cases are NOT about: –

  • They are not about a ‘compo claim’ as the media would have it. Those affected would give anything not to have had to make a claim in the first place.
  • They are not about speed. They are about ensuring a life time provision of care and assistance for someone who will always need help. That takes time. Payments should be made on an ongoing basis until enough is known to accurately assess what lifetime need is likely to be.
  • They are not about learning lessons. Lessons should be learned but linking recompense to learning lessons is unnecessary. The NHS should have a commitment to preventing future occurrence anyway. In any event, lessons are not being learned. Only last year, a report by the Care Quality Commission found that 37 per cent of maternity services were “inadequate” or “require improvement”. Shockingly, Britain still has one of the worst stillbirth rates in the Western world according to international rankings.

As we all know – prevention is better than cure. What is Jeremy Hunt doing to prevent serious brain injury occurring in the first place?

The first port of call for many concerned parents isn’t litigation, it is the NHS Complaints system.

Put simply, the complaints procedure in the UK doesn’t work. Even the Public Administration Select Committee concluded ‘the processes for investigating and learning from incidents are complicated, take far too long and are preoccupied with blame or avoiding financial liability’.

Parliament recommended an independent Healthcare safety investigation Bureau. The Bureau was set up but without the independence that was needed. The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee stated

“We remain deeply concerned that HSIB has been established without the necessary primary legislation to assure the independence of the new body and create a statutory ‘safe space’ and that it has been established inside an existing NHS regulator rather than as an independent body. The government must take seriously the need to provide HSIB with a legislative base that will enable it to carry out its functions to full effect, and to establish it as an independent body. The government should bring forward appropriate primary legislation without delay.”

Turning back to Sweden, its complaints process is separate from the system that compensates patients for injuries but it is not completely independent. Some studies showed that less than one-third of the complainants were satisfied after handling and with healthcare providers’ statements about the complaint. The most frequent causes for dissatisfaction were that the healthcare provider ‘did not tell the truth’ or ‘gave insufficient information’.

Sound familiar?

Jennie Henderson has recently joined following six years spent in private practice and with the NHS Litigation Authority.

Jennie Henderson

Jennie has worked in the personal injury & clinical negligence field since 2010, and was part of the team that secured over £15 million in the leading cerebral palsy case of Robshaw v United Lincolnshire NHS Trust.

Jennie will be assisting two of the partners in the Clinical Negligence team – Linda Levison and Marcus Weatherby – as well as acting for the firms clients across a range of complex clinical negligence matters.

Marcus Weatherby welcomed the news:

“Jennie is an excellent young lawyer and she is totally committed to helping us fight for justice for our clients who have suffered injury as a result of clinical negligence.  She is a very strong addition to our team and is already demonstrating real drive and enthusiasm for getting the best results for our clients.”

The Royal College of Surgeons has today published a variety of online resources and advice for patients considering cosmetic surgery.

The new webpage includes a handy printable checklist of questions that patients should ask their surgeon before consenting to a procedure. Patients are encouraged to take the checklist to the first consultation and discuss each topic with the treating surgeon. Such questions include the surgeon’s specialism, their insurance position and the potential costs of any future treatment. Crucially, patients are also being encouraged to consider all of the treatment options available to them as well as the potential risks and benefits of each procedure. Patients are cautioned against feeling rushed or pressured into giving their consent and are warned to be wary of surgeons and staff trying to convince them to go ahead.

The Department of Health asked the Royal College of Surgeons to produce the patient focused resources and the website follows hot on the heels of the April 2016 guidelines published by the General Medical Counsel for doctors offering cosmetic interventions.

In the coming months, the website should be supplemented by a new register of certified surgeons who have provided evidence of their training, experience and insurance.

It is hoped that the new online resources will help to provide independent, trustworthy information to patients and better protect them from unscrupulous companies and untrained surgeons.

By Alicia Cannon.

I was intrigued by recent reports that a new blood test can detect serious brain injuries. Brain injury is the leading cause of death and disability in young people. To diagnose brain injuries, scans are performed but this can cause delay and lead to patients’ conditions deteriorating and in the worst case scenario fatalities.

There are several different causes of brain injuries which can include:

 

Current diagnosis of brain injuries

Often people who suffer brain injuries might appear to be fine; they can be acting normally despite being seriously injured. A brain injury is not blatantly obvious in the same way as a physical injury, such as a broken arm or leg.

Brain injuries can be diagnosed by computerised tomography (‘CT’) scans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (‘MRI’) scans and through detecting clinical symptoms.

Symptoms of a brain injury vary from person to person and they might include:

 

Physical symptoms

  • Loss of consciousness from several minutes to hours
  • Persistent headache or headache that worsens
  • Repeated vomiting or nausea
  • Convulsions or seizures
  • Weakness or numbness in fingers and toes
  • Loss of coordination

 

Cognitive or mental symptoms

  • Profound confusion
  • Agitation, combativeness or other unusual behavior
  • Slurred speech

These symptoms can sometimes be missed by doctors. Symptoms of brain injury are also hard to pick up in toddlers and babies, who are unable to articulate their symptoms in the same way as adults.

It can be years before symptoms of a brain injury are diagnosed. Sometimes brain injuries are not obvious until children start school and a learning disability is suspected and diagnosed, such as attention deficit hyper disorder (ADHD) or attention deficit disorder (ADD).[1]

CT scans reveal whether a head injury has caused bleeding in the brain but do not indicate whether the brain cells themselves have been injured. Damage to the brain cells can happen without bleeding.

What the test could achieve

This blood test for brain injury developed by researchers in Birmingham could:

  • save lives by detecting whether someone needs neurosurgery;
  • minimise the number of CT scans being done, which is particularly beneficial to children who are especially sensitive to radiation;
  • improve lives by implementing treatment and rehabilitation faster, perhaps by advising whether someone needs to take time off school and deciding whether they need to follow up with a neurologist; and
  • save money by avoiding carrying out expensive scans on people who do not have brain injuries

 

How does the test work?

A small drop of blood is placed on a silicon and gold chip and then it is placed in a special detector for analysis. The test looks for tiny amounts of chemicals that are produced when the brain is injured.

Discovered by the University of Birmingham and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, researchers have carried out the tests using blood from real patients. They confirm that the test accurately detects those patients with injury to their brain and those who are not injured.

Blood test to detect brain injury

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The researchers aim to reduce its size by half so in the future it could be carried by an ambulance crew and used at the scene of an accident. At the moment there is no equipment for paramedics thatcan determine whether someone has had a serious brain injury so this is a huge advancement for emergency services and I look forward to seeing it develop and be implemented.
Following further development it is hoped that the detector can be reduced to the size of a briefcase. It would therefore be easy to keep at sports grounds or in army vehicles in combat.

A team from the University of Birmingham and the city’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital hope the detector could be on the market within three years.

 

By Alicia Cannon.

The research, part-funded by the British Heart Foundation and the National Institute of Health Research, showed the increase of heart attack treatment gives nine in ten patients fighting chance of survival.

The use of emergency stenting treatment (PPCI), also known as angioplasty, increased from 0.1% in 2003 to 86% in 2013 for patients with STEMI – a heart attack caused by a complete blockage of a coronary artery which accounts for 25-40% of all heart attack cases in Europe.

Despite this, the study found there are vast differences in PPCI use in various hospitals, ranging from a 4-300% increase from 2003 to 2013 showing that opportunities are still being missed due to gross lack of funding. Other factors including the low number of suitably trained cardiologists and an absence of round the clock availability of PPCI in heart attack clinics has helped to explain 50% of the variation between hospitals.

What does PPCI do?

PPCI involves opening a blocked artery to restore blood flow to the oxygen-starved part of the heart and has helped save thousands of lives since becoming available in the early 2000’s and the introduction of PPCI followed a ten-year action plan for heart disease which saw national changes in the way the NHS treats heart attack patients.

This is an exemplar for how proper funding of the NHS can produce life saving results for patients in the UK. Following these disturbing results of the varied PPCI use from hospital to hospital, The Government should now ensure that the NHS has sufficiently resourced heart attack centres providing round the clock care for heart attack patients, to avoid unnecessary loss of life.

The British Heart Foundation continues to fund research to improve heart attack diagnosis and treatment, including a study which could reduce complications from stenting with donations from the public. We can only hope that the Government takes note of the inconsistent use of PPCI across the UK’s hospitals, along with the credible results of this 10 year study, and begin suitably funding clinics to continue treating patients with PPCI and saving lives.

Here at Pattinson & Brewer solicitors, we welcome news of medical advances as we share the aim to improve a patient outcome and ensure safety for everybody during NHS treatment.