Oliver v Williams
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Lord Justice Moore-Bick |
| Judgment Date | 23 July 2013 |
| Neutral Citation | [2013] EWCA Civ 1328 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) |
| Docket Number | Case no: A2/2013/0771 |
| Date | 23 July 2013 |
[2013] EWCA Civ 1328
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
(MR SIMON MASKREY QC)
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand
London WC2A 2LL
Lord Justice Moore-Bick
Case no: A2/2013/0771
Mr John De Bono (instructed by DWP Fishburns) appeared on behalf of the Applicant.
The Respondent did not appear and was not represented.
(Approved by the court)
This is a renewed application for permission to appeal following refusal on paper by the single Lord Justice. It concerns an order for costs made by the judge following the trial of a claim for medical negligence.
It is well recognised that the judge at trial has a wide ambit of discretion when making an award of costs. However, occasionally that wide discretion is exceeded and, if it is, this court will set aside his order. The question for decision on this application is whether there is any real prospect of persuading the court that the judge did exceed the legitimate ambit of his discretion in this case.
The respondent, Mrs Oliver, brought a claim against her GP, the applicant, Mr Williams, for failure to alert her to the fact that he was referring her to a hospital consultant for an investigation of her symptoms. Apparently there were no arrangements at the practice for ensuring that patients received an appointment other than relying on them to chase up the hospital, and unfortunately the letter from Mr Williams to the hospital seeking an appointment went astray. As a result there was a delay, said to be of some five or six months, in obtaining an appointment and in carrying out the examination and the eventual diagnosis of ovarian cancer.
Once her illness had been identified, Mrs Oliver had treatment by surgery and subsequently by two courses of chemotherapy. She said that her expectation of life had been reduced as a result of the delay in obtaining her initial appointment and subsequent treatment. She also said that she had suffered an adverse psychological reaction, and that left her in a worse position to cope with the side effects of the treatment.
The only issue relating to liability at trial was whether the doctor had told Mrs Oliver that he had referred her urgently to a consultant for examination. The judge found that she had not been told of the referral and had not been warned to keep an eye out for the letter confirming an appointment. He therefore found that there had been a breach of duty. The next question he had to consider was what were the consequences. He found that if Mrs Oliver had been told that an urgent referral had been made, she would in due course have undergone broadly the same treatment, having surgery some five and a half months sooner than in fact was the case. The experts agreed that the delay would have made no real difference, however, to the staging of the disease or the treatment options that she would have been offered.
In due course, Mrs...
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