On 22 November 2007 a settlement was reached, during Mediation, in which our client was awarded damages and a conciliatory meeting with the NHS trust who were treating her late husband.
Our client’s husband contracted MRSA whilst undergoing elective surgery for an aortic aneurysm. He had not been swabbed for MRSA colonisation prior to the surgery, even though he had undergone gall bladder surgery in the same hospital during an MRSA outbreak a few weeks previously. After the surgery he was in increasingly ill health and was, after much delay, diagnosed with MRSA. Our client’s husband underwent major surgery to replace the tissue destroyed by MRSA with a bypass graft. He never fully regained his health and died in November 2003 from an intestinal haemorrhage.
Our client made a formal complaint about her husband’s treatment but was not satisfied with the response. Her concern was that, neither at the inquest, nor in the complaint, had the truth been identified or the lessons learned.
Our client brought a claim on behalf of her late husband for the five months of extremely ill health leading up to his death. Our client also brought a bereavement and dependency claim on her own behalf.
We wrote to the hospital, but liability was denied. We then issued court proceedings and persuaded the Trust to try mediation. Our client wanted compensation but also a constructive apology, based on a complete understanding by the Trust of the real issues involved in her husband’s treatment. The case was settled on the day of the mediation. The financial agreement ended litigation proceedings and the Defendant hospital agreed to a subsequent meeting with our client at the hospital itself where all relevant matters could be discussed fully and frankly.
At that meeting our client learned for the first time that her husband’s tragic story had been used in staff training, and that lessons learned from his case had been fed into new policies and protocols – something which she could not have been told while litigation was pending.
A full apology was then provided. It was agreed by all involved that this had been a novel and positive method of concluding a claim and was wholly to be encouraged in other cases.
