R (Chidlow) v Senior Coroner for Blackpool and Flyde [2019] EWHC 581 (Admin)
Humans’ bodies being such complex organisms it is unsurprising that medical causation is often extremely complicated and that the law regarding the legal causation of medical injuries can be particularly convoluted.
Indivisible injuries, multifactorial causation, material contribution, loss of a chance etc. create a precarious legal minefield for clinical negligence lawyers to navigate before one even begins to wander into the less well marked territory of the coronial jurisdiction.
Here one must step even more carefully around the danger zone of semantics – wondering whether there really is any effective difference between the ‘causation threshold’ words of minimal or trivial or negligible, whilst remembering the ‘causation standard’ of probable is not what is possible, but not forgetting that a missed opportunity to make a difference may still matter and that Art 2 might anyway require the possible to be recorded regardless of proof.
But this week brings good news for all who must negotiate these coronial causation booby-traps. Mr Justice Pepperall has deployed the mine rollers ahead of you – so take off your personal protective equipment and put down the metal detector – if you want to protect yourself from triggering a legal casualty just take some time out to read and learn from the Divisional Court’s erudite exposition of two fundamental points regarding causation at inquests:
- Causation is more than a matter of medical statistics – even where survivors are a majority category.
Something more than being a potential figure in a statistic will be needed that suggests the deceased would probably have been in the category of survivors[1];
- There is an important difference between being able to identify what someone died from and being able to say whether, regardless of what precisely caused their death, their life could have been saved with earlier medical attention.
Unfortunately a failure to discern that essential difference led the Senior Coroner in the present case to err in law when he withdrew from the jury the question of whether an admitted delay in an ambulance attending a man contributed to his death. The Coroner had wrongly concluded that, because there was no clear cause of death, it was not safe to allow the jury to consider the causal effect of the delay in him receiving treatment.
“Establishing a medical cause of death was not essential to being able to form an opinion as to the effect of delayed treatment.”
Moreover, the medical expert’s evidence on survivability was not an opinion based solely on statistics. The expert’s view that the deceased would have lived with prompt treatment also relied upon clinical experience; accounts of the deceased’s condition when attended; reading of the other medical evidence (specifically the post-mortem findings and the lack of any underlying disease or infection in an apparently fit young man). The jury were not bound to accept this expert’s opinion, but his view was not so obviously unreliable that it was not safe to leave the issue of causation to the jury.