Lidia Monteverdi on 2GB discussing Medical Negligence 4 September 2021

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CS – Chris Smith/LM – Lidia Monteverdi /C1,2,3, etc – Callers

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Listen to the podcast

Read the transcript below:

CS       Now Maddie, one of our listeners wrote to us during the week and Maddie says about six months ago she had a caesarean to deliver her baby, the surgeon started cutting before the anaesthetic took effect. Ow, and so I felt everything she said, I’ve now been diagnosed with PTSD and anxiety because of it, can I sue the surgeon?

LM     Oh Maddie, I’m so sorry to hear that this has happened to you, cases like this are known as anaesthetic awareness cases and Chris as I’m sure you can imagine they’re a really sad set of circumstances, so Maddie in order to bring a claim in negligence you have to show that the surgeon breached his or her duty of care to you which has caused you to suffer from some damage of harm. Now the question often in cases like yours is whether it was appropriate for the surgeon to commence surgery without checking to make sure that the anaesthetic had been administered and that it had taken effect and can I say that on the basis of my experience it’s virtually never appropriate to commence surgery before checking to make sure anaesthetic is working. Now if you can establish negligence you can bring a claim for your mental health condition if you can prove that you’ve suffered a recognised psychiatric injury as a result of what happened to you. You do this by being assessed by a psychiatrist who will give you that opinion about your injury and look I really encourage you to get in touch with us at Turner Freeman we can give you some further advice and we can make all the necessary arrangements for a psychiatrist’s assessment.

CS       What a terrible experience, alright. Ben is writing an email here to us, I’ve just been diagnosed with cancer. Sorry to hear that Ben, my oncologist says that I have had the tumour for a while and it should have been picked up earlier, I’m worried that my prognosis will be worse because there has been a delay in treatment, what are my options?

LM     Ben, this is unfortunately a scenario that I’ve heard a number of times, so in order for you to bring a claim you would have to establish that there’s been a breach of duty of care, now it sounds to me that the issue is usually whether a doctor you previously saw should have investigated any symptoms you had, whether if they were investigated, normally by way of scans or blood tests that weren’t reported properly, so a classic example of this is a tumour being missed and not reported on a CT scan and sometimes the issue is that your doctor did actually order those tests, they correctly showed your cancer and your doctor simply overlooked the results or didn’t follow up with you. If you can establish a breach of duty of care, you then need to establish that it has caused you to suffer some damage or harm so the issue there that we have to prove is whether if your cancer had been picked up, diagnosed and treated earlier you more likely than to have obtained a better outcome. 

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