MEDICO LEGAL M A G A Z I N E
LITIGATION CULTURE UNDER THE MICROSCOPE By Dr Robert Baker MSc PhD MRCP FRCPath DipGUM Consultant Senior Lecturer, Medical Microbiology and Virology, Musgrove Park and Yeovil Hospitals
Do you honestly understand microbiology? Few do, and the same applies in litigation. We microbiologists occupy a backstage, geeky niche. The definition of an extrovert pathologist is someone who looks at your shoes when they’re talking to you rather than their own. Nevertheless, our clinical colleagues often need our nerdy advice about obscure bacteria whose names they never learned at Medical School. Why remember the susceptibilities of Stenotrophononas maltophilia when you could be fixing bones, delivering babies or implanting cardiac devices? Which is fine, until it all goes wrong. Since the early 1900s Infectious Diseases have slipped down the list of causes of death and disability, despite emerging resistance to antibiotics. That means patients do not expect to get infections, and, when they do, they expect them to be curable. Otherwise they may sue, and sometimes on good grounds. I have advised early settlement in several indefensible cases, some fatal.
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It may go the other way. Here’s a recent extreme example – a baby born with brain damage whose mother sued the Trust many years after delivery. The final settlement was £4m – yes four million pounds – less than the original claim, and that reduced sum was largely based on my microbiology evidence; the mother had obvious intrauterine infection of a sort that has only recently been recognised as causing foetal brain damage. Four million pounds is several multiples of a Consultant’s NHS lifetime earnings plus pension. Basically, I am in credit with the NHS for my salary and more. As with any expert witness, you would not get far if your reports were biased. Nevertheless, as a committed supporter of the NHS I get some pleasure from challenging the obvious chancers – an increasingly common phenomenon in the world of “no win no fee”. It isn’t always the NHS either – in a recent case two families developed infectious
