We’re really proud of the new site and the unique offering it has for medical negligence claims of all types whether relating to potential NHS related claims or Private medical treatments.

So what’s different ?

The public understandably tend to misunderstand the difference between medical negligence claims and many other forms of personal injury. this is probably based on tv and radio adverts which can give the impression that claims are straightforward and it’s all about how much compensation the advertiser can get you.

All forms of injury claim have 2 sides – the issue of legal liability and then, if there is a strong case on this, the value of the claim.

It is true to say that with some forms of injury claim, especially road traffic accidents, there is a good degtree of predictability on liability, and these have been the majority of claims, in volume terms. Hemnvce the advertising which in reality has been targeting these types of claims.

Other forms of injury claim, such as workplace injury claim, can be more difficult on liability and medical negligence claims are a whole different category, generally being far more complex and where legal liability may be contested right through to trial. In these cases, expert medical evidence is absolutely critical. To succeed in almost all cases, it will be necessary for an acknowledged expert in the same medical field to provide evidence that the treatment was negligent in law.

All of this means that the fact finding stage of medical negligence claims can take a long time and the cases are far more risky for lawyers to take on on a no win no fee basis. Most firms will not commit to offering no win no fee, for obviously sensible reasons, unless and until there is strong evidence in support of the claim. this in turn can mean that prospective claimants must fund the investigative part of the claim.

Lloyd Green’s new offering seeks to remove the element of delay and enable faster decisions to be made on offering now in no fee. We seek to make a preliminary decision within 72 hours via our expert team of legal and medical experts. This is a radical departure from the process adopted by most other forms, as detailed above.

If you would like to discuss a medical negligence issue, please contact us or visit the new site, which we hope you will find useful.

The stated general aims of the protocol are –

• to maintain/restore the patient/healthcare provider relationship;
• to resolve as many disputes as possible without litigation.

The specific objectives are –

Openness

• To encourage early communication of the perceived problem between patients and healthcare providers;
• to encourage patients to voice any concerns or dissatisfaction with their treatment as soon as practicable;
• to encourage healthcare providers to develop systems of early reporting and investigation for serious adverse treatment outcomes and to provide full and prompt explanations to dissatisfied patients;
• to ensure that sufficient information is disclosed by both parties to enable each to understand the other’s perspective and case, and to encourage early resolution;

Timeliness

• to provide an early opportunity for healthcare providers to identify cases where an investigation is required and to carry out that investigation promptly;
• to encourage primary and private healthcare providers to involve their defence organisations or insurers at an early stage;
• to ensure that all relevant medical records are provided to patients or their appointed representatives on request, to a realistic timetable by any healthcare provider;
• to ensure that relevant records which are not in healthcare providers’ possession are made available to them by patients and their advisers at an appropriate stage;
• where a resolution is not achievable to lay the ground to enable litigation to proceed on a reasonable timetable, at a reasonable and proportionate cost and to limit the matters in contention;
• to discourage the prolonged pursuit of unmeritorious claims and the prolonged defence of meritorious claims.

Protocol

From a legal perspective, if any internal complaint procedure been concluded, or else the client has chosen to proceed straight to a more legal process, the following would be the norm:-

1.            Obtain medical records from relevant healthcare providers e.g. GP, Hospital/s; these should be supplied within 40 days of request but rarely are. An application can be made to the Court to compel their supply if necessary.

2.            As soon as possible thereafter, a comprehensive letter of claim (LOC) should be sent to the proposed Defendant/responsible party. This is an important document which can sometimes require the input of an expert witness but in our practice we usually draft and send the LOC ourselves since it saves time and we are confident in our ability to do this.

3.            The Defendants then have 120 days in which to respond and save in exceptional circumstances it would be frowned upon to take any formal legal steps in the meantime e.g. to commence legal proceedings.

4.            Where possible, an offer to settle should be made anyway prior to any legal proceedings being instituted.

5.            In our experience, Defendants struggle to do so within 120 days (usually, we believe, due to their own witnesses and experts failing to reply to their queries) but ideally a detailed letter of response will be sent within that time, setting out the grounds of defence to the claim or else admitting it, or art of it.

6.            If the latter, any expert evidence not by that time having been received will be obtained. Expert evidence may be shared, in order to save costs, or one or both parties may elect to acquire their own expert’s reports.

7.            Such expert evidence will then be disclosed, and negotiations (usually accompanied by formal offer/s to settle) should hopefully result in settlement…….otherwise litigation may ensue as a last resort.

8.            A meeting can be arranged between the parties in suitable cases to discuss the issues and sometimes will result not only in the amount of compensation being agreed but, often as important to clients in our experience, a proper explanation and apology given for the events that had led to the dispute in the first place.

 Lloyd Green

Nick is a partner and experienced and empathetic injury lawyer.

solicitors, will quickly and expertly lead you through every step of the journey from initial call and discussion to the final settlement of your claim.

Please feel free to call us for a no obligation opinion about your situation or proposed claim.

Should there be a viable case to be made, all our experts at Lloyd Green, solicitors, will subsequently be happy to act for you on a “no win, no fee” basis.

When you specifically ask your GP or, in this case, the Out of Hours Doctor, what best to do while you are temporarily away to tend to an ailing relative elsewhere, and when you already have someone at home who needs to have an eye kept on him since he is recovering from a medical condition himself, you are entitled to rely on the advice that you receive from that Doctor.

Tragically, in this case, instead of being given the right advice, it was anything but.  Indeed, it was directly causative of his death.

In this case, our client’s husband was in the process of adjusting to abstinence from alcohol in February 2010.

He had a past history of drinking but had not been tempted for many years until certain distressing circumstances had caused him to temporarily lapse. However, recognising his error, he had stopped again and was in the course of recovering back to his normal state again.

Aware of the unpleasant side-effects of that recovery period, his family were reassured by the OOH Doctor that while his wife was away for several of days, he should be admitted to a local “cottage hospital” where the requisite watchful eye would be available and furthermore there would be medical staff on tap if needed.

Unbeknown to the family, the hospital’s own admissions policy specifically excluded persons going through “detoxification” due to the seriousness of this condition, being a  potentially life threatening one.

Yet, despite this clear exclusion, and as opposed to his admission to an acute unit of the local major hospital, he was taken in by the cottage hospital. Reservations were expressed by several of the nursing staff immediately; those who had dealt with patients in similar circumstances and were aware that he was in the wrong place.

Unhappily it appears that the internal procedures in the hospital were not so robust or otherwise such as to facilitate the sharing of this information. Instead, when the gentleman’s condition deteriorated, the hospital staff attempted to treat him as best they could but lacked the experience, resources and expertise to do so properly. Within several days he had lost consciousness at which time only did the duty Doctor elect to have him transferred as an emergency case to the acute unit.

Miraculously, testament to his own tenacity and strength, the gentleman regained consciousness and temporarily improved, however it would seem that the effort of fighting the aspiration pneumonia that he developed during a prolonged battle had ultimately weakened him and, against a background of an underlying heart condition, he eventually, tragically, succumbed.

Our advice

We were asked to help in April 2010 and were greatly assisted by a comprehensive statement and chronology of events from the deceased’s son.

Due to the unusual circumstances that led to this death, the Coroner decided that an Inquest was appropriate. We wrote to the Coroner’s Officer in May 2010 to set out our preliminary thoughts in respect of the issues that we considered he might wish to investigate.

It is right to say that the Coroner and his Officer were rigorous and thorough in the face of indolence and opposition from numerous important witnesses but those difficulties resulted in the Inquest being delayed until October 2012.

In the meantime, we had had the benefit of reading an excellent SUI (serious untoward incident) report commissioned by the relevant Trust which was critical of various clinicians, clinical bodies, and the clinical procedures that had occurred.

Bolstered by this, we drafted and sent lengthy letters of claim to the OOH service and the relevant Doctor, and to the Trust responsible for the cottage hospital.

None of these met with any substantive reply and nobody was prepared to accept any responsibility.

The Inquest lasted for 3 days and we represented the family at this. While the function of an Inquest is to establish the facts surrounding a death and the cause of that death, rather that to apportion any blame, it was immediately apparent that we were effectively opposed by about a dozen lawyers representing the other interested/implicated agencies and individuals.

The family were to be forgiven for believing that legal costs were no object in the efforts being made to avoid accepting any blame for this tragedy….or perhaps there were so many expensive lawyers and medical staff present in order to simply learn lessons for the future?

Our unfortunate client in this case, Mr P, a Sales Advisor at a DIY Store, was injured while at work in July 2010. He was assisting a colleague unloading paving slabs from a delivery van. His colleague was using a tower lift machine to lift the pallets when the tower lift tipped forward causing the pallet to fall on to Mr P.

Mr P sustained an injury to his shoulder and a laceration above his eye. He attended his GP and was referred for physiotherapy. The cut above is eye settled within a week but he was left with a faint scar.

Mr P. was off work for three days and then returned on lighter duties for 3 months.

Mr P. has improved significantly but has been left with some minor pain and stiffness. The Orthopaedic surgeon estimates that he will improve further over the next 12 months.

How did we help ?

We initially wrote a letter of claim to his employers alleging that they were negligent, had breached the statutory duty of care that they owed to him and were vicariously liable for the actions of Mr P’s colleague. We pointed out that these breaches had caused his injuries. The Defendants responded, after carrying investigations, and admitted liability for Mr P’s accident, subject to him proving that the accident caused his injuries.

We obtained Mr P’s medical records and instructed a GP to examine him and prepare a report on his injuries. We also obtained his earnings details and quantified his claim for loss of earnings.

The GP  identified that the accident had exacerbated Mr P’s pre-existing shoulder problems and referred him for an ultrasound scan and to an orthopaedic surgeon, for a further opinion.

Mr P had a scan privately and went to see a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon. The Consultant recommended physiotherapy and we obtained interim payments from the Defendant’s insurers to enable  treatment as soon as possible. Following completion of the treatment the Consultant gave the prognosis that Mr P’s symptoms were caused by the accident and were not related to any previous condition. He advised that they would settle within 12 months.

The Consultant’s evidence enabled us to prove that the accident had caused Mr P’s symptoms and to value his injuries.

Compensation

We advised Mr P to put an offer to his employers’ insurers to settle his claim for £4,355.00 on top of the sum he had already obtained to pay for his physiotherapy. This offer was accepted.

If you are an employee who has sustained an injury at work, please get in touch using the contact form or by calling us, we have huge experience of employee claims and offer a no win no fee service. For general advice on employee work claims click here.

I bet you are all sick and tired of hearing ‘no win no fee’…well after April 1st it will be a phrase of the past.

The government, in their bid to please the ‘oh so poor hard done by insurance companies’ have decided to take away many peoples access to justice, potentially allowing hundreds of employers, business owners and so forth, to enjoy negligent practices, flaunt health and safety regulations and allow people to become injured, without fear of being affected in the only way they will listen to…their pockets!

As of said ‘doomsday’, the insurance companies in the majority of cases, will not be forced to pay for innocent victims legal costs, thus, these victims will have to stump up the legal fees themselves, which in many cases on a private paying basis would eat away at most of their compensation. How is this fair?

There will if course be some firms, such as ourselves, who will attempt to soften that blow and do what we can to fix our fees on a percentage scale to ensure that victims still receive compensation and don’t have to stump up cash in advance before a case is taken on.

Of course, once the changes come in to place on ‘doomsday’ we will do all that we can to remain giving excellent service to those seeking justice, but if you have suffered an injury through someone else’s negligence ACT FAST, get your claim registered before the changes on 1st April 2013.

CALL NOW FOR A NO OBLIGATION DISCUSSION ABOUT YOUR PERSONAL INJURY.

Nick is a partner and experienced and empathetic injury lawyer.

April 1st has always been known as the time for the Daily Express to publish the first pictures of the Yeti, or little green men arriving in Cleethorpes, or a donkey that has given birth to a tigerdonk.

You get the general gist.

In every such case, a bit of fun and merriment to put a smile on the face of most, and embarrass a naïve, gullible, easily led few.

This year, however, April 1st brings an altogether different sort of joke for us to “enjoy”.

On April 1st 2013, the results of the Government’s latest efforts to demonstrate how utterly out of touch with reality they really are will come to fruition.

The countdown to April 1st should come with a health warning and be read and re-read by all.

On this day, the definition of a small claim (legal parlance for the value of a case which is so menial and unimportant that there is no need for lawyers to get involved) will increase from its already massive £5,000.00 to a whopping £10,000.00.

Just think about it.

£10,000.00.

From April 1st, if you pay over your life savings of £9,999.99 to a builder to have an extension fitted to your house, and the whole thing falls down the next day, you will have to use the small claims process to sue him (sorry, but most builders/cowboys are male !) to get your money back.

The point of the small claims process is that of course you can employ a solicitor and, if you wish, a barrister as well to assist you but even when you win the then contrite apologetic builder will not have to pay your legal costs.

Seriously? Yes, seriously.

Well done, the Government. Really well done.

What’s next, you might ask?

Making disabled people go to work to save the Benefits bill. Surely not?

Emily Hale – Personal Injury Solicitor

Until a person reaches the age of 18, they are considered, by the law, to be a child and therefore are unable to commence proceedings on their own behalf.

As such, a long time ago, the law developed a facility whereby a parent, or guardian, can take responsibility of the claim and act on behalf of the child as, what is called, a Litigation Friend.

My client here, who I will name as Child L, sued the Defendant via her mother as Litigation Friend.

My client,  3 years old at the time of the accident, was travelling on a double decker bus, which was approaching a designated stop.  The bus driver remotely opened the doors as he was pulling into the bus stop and the faulty door jammed my client’s foot and ripped her boot.  The bus driver came to the child’s aid but was unable to open the door and had to manually open it. The child suffered  injuries to her foot and face, sleep disruption, nightmares and travel anxiety she suffered after the accident.

The accident had caused a deformity in my client’s foot, namely that the 4th toe was underlying the 3rd toe, so this caused her problems with weight bearing and therefore walking and enjoying life. 

Outcome of this case ?

We contacted the Defendant bus company and advised them of the accident and the negligence which caused the injuries.  Fortunately, the Defendant admitted liability and was supportive of  investigations and treatment for the injured child.

Due to my client’s young age, at the time of the incident, she was required to attend medical examinations with various paediatricians, arranged by Lloyd Green Solicitors and follow-up appointments, as she grew and her bones developed.

The Medical experts recommended that my client would benefit from having some surgery to correct the deformity but there was a fear here that the correction itself could create complications.

Fortunately, payment was secured from the Defendant, in order to arrange the surgery to go ahead, privately, with the Consultant Paediatrician, who had provided all of his expertise to date.  The surgery, luckily, went very well, leading to a complete recovery by 6¾ years after the accident.

The compensation process

As the Rules require, all the medical evidence was provided to a Barrister in order that he provide his opinion as to reasonable settlement value for my client’s claim.  Following this procedure and my client’s mother and Litigation Friend being happy with the amounts agreed, offers were put to the Defendant Insurers and an assessment was then reached, in the sum of £9,090.00 for full satisfaction of the claim.

As my client was still a child at the time of settlement, it was required by the Rules that she attend what is known as an Infant Approval Hearing.  My client therefore attended the Court with her mother as Litigation Friend and a Barrister and went before a District Judge, who discussed the case with my client and her Litigation Friend, confirming that my client had fully recovered in line with the prognosis period and providing his agreement to the amount of settlement agreed, therefore approving the settlement.

In line with the Rules, the Judge therefore ordered for the compensation monies to be paid into the Court Fund Account, where it will stay accruing interest until my client attains the age of 18 and is able to receive the monies from the Court in her own name.

Any accident involving  child is extremely traumatising for the child but also his or her family. We offer a sympathetic and highly experienced and effective no win no fee service, so contact us if your child has suffered an injury.

Plastic surgeons almost universally agree that proper regulation of this burgeoning industry is overdue and now urgently needed.

Society appears to be demanding, or at least those vulnerable to these practices believe that society demands, that their external appearance is as close to perfection as it can be. Hence, the greater their use and correspondingly the greater the complaints that are arising.

With a significant 1 in 3 prepared to admit to being unhappy with the outcome of treatment, and inevitably so many more being reticent about accepting that it was a mistake to “go under the syringe”, this is now a real problem that must be acknowledged and addressed now, not least (from a political perspective alone) because it will increasingly constitute a drain on NHS resources.

We need to have better governance for the cosmetic filler industry, certainly, but fundamentally society needs to take a wider look at itself.

For years we have been admonishing the fashion industry for failing to use models who are not dangerously thin yet the situation shows no obvious sign of improvement.

The proliferation of dermal fillers, botox, nasal enhancements, breast lifts, reductions and enlargements, cosmetic dentistry and so on is evidence enough, if further evidence were needed, that education is nothing less than essential from an early age (particularly for girls) to accept one’s individual appearance and eschew the necessity to tamper with this, with often life changing consequences.

Nick is a partner and experienced and empathetic injury lawyer.

Getting across the truth of the cliche “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” was never more important.

For expert help on cosmetic claims, please get in touch or you may want to visit our main page on this issue.

With the third party being a haulage vehicle, it was very difficult for our client to obtain any insurance details from the driver and he approached Lloyd Green Solicitors to assist with his enquiries.

Our advice to our client

We immediately approached the haulage company with a formal notification of our client’s claim and the injury that had been caused. After several enquiries with the haulage company, we eventually managed to establish the insurance company in place and liability was fairly swiftly resolved.

However, due to the impact, our client’s injury required an extensive amount of physiotherapy treatment that we also managed to arrange on behalf of the client.  The treatment was provided at no cost to our client and he was grateful that we were able to start alleviating the symptoms he was suffering.  Due to the initial severity of our client’s injury, a claim for cost of care and assistance was also pursued by ourselves and the third party insurance company included this as an award within our client’s final compensation, as a burden had been placed upon our client’s partner to care for our client at a hectic and emotional time of moving home.  It was also important to include our client’s travelling expenses when attending each physiotherapy session, as this is not something that our client had accounted for prior to the accident and was simply the result of the third party’s negligence.

By conclusion of our client’s claim, he reported a majority recovery and was grateful for the intervention of the physiotherapy treatment that we had been able to provide our client.

More Information

If you would like information or advice in relation to a similar (or, for that matter, completely different) accident, please do not hesitate to telephone or email us.

In this claim, our client, Mr J, was working as a fire fighter with colleagues and was in the process of cutting a casualty out of a vehicle which had been badly damaged in a road traffic accident.

On a bright Monday morning, in July 2010, Mr J was holding a protection shield over his casualty, so that his colleague could remove the doors and roof of the casualty’s vehicle, in order to remove her safely so that she could receive medical attention.  Unexpectedly, an airbag exploded from the casualty’s chair and hit the board Mr J was holding, crushing Mr J’s hand.

Mr J’s hand was crushed in the incident, badly damaging his thumb, requiring treatment at his local NHS hospital and his local G.P., to include surgery and the insertion of a wire to assist the repairing of the bones within his thumb.

How we handled this case

Mr J contacted Lloyd Green Solicitors for help and enquired as to whether there was any claim that he could bring.

We set out the details of Mr J’s accident, the reasons why we considered the defendant responsible and details of Mr J’s injuries, in a letter to Mr J’s employers.  Mr J’s employers were prepared to admit a breach of duty but did not admit that their breach of duty caused the injury, loss and damage suffered by Mr J and therefore, we were put to strict proof of this.

We arranged for Mr J to be examined by a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon, with a specialism in hands.  The expert provided us with the evidence we needed, to enable us to value the appropriate award for Mr J’s injuries and enter into negotiations to settle his claim, to include his associated expenses, such as medication taken and even a subrogated claim to repay Mr J’s employers for the company sick pay that they provided to him, following the accident.

The outcome

Once all of the medical evidence was obtained, we entered into negotiations with the Defendant and put offers to them, to which they countered offers before finally agreeing on a settlement of £6,251.20.