McLoughlin v O’Brian [1982] UKHL 3 – Law Journals

Psychiatric Injury: Victims of circumstance

Liam Ryan reports on claims by rescuers and secondary victims, and assesses the need for law reform ‘Is it not time to at least consider if people who provide more than “trivial or peripheral assistance” in the wake of a disaster should also be classed as rescuers in a new, and wider, concept?’ In recent …

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Psychiatric Injury: Picking up the pieces

Liam Ryan investigates unintended tragedies and the scope of secondary victims ‘It seems now to be clear that where a defendant is negligent while a baby is still “in utero” and personal injury (either to the child or mother) was a foreseeable consequence, then the mother will be capable of recovering compensation for any subsequent …

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Secondary Victims: A race between the claimant and the ambulance?

Brenna Conroy outlines the distinction between appreciation of an accident and witnessing a victim’s injuries for secondary victim claims ‘One of the key themes that emerges from recent authorities is that a secondary victim claim will fail where the primary victim has received treatment such as to make that scene sufficiently different to that at …

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Nervous Shock: Secondary victims of clinical negligence

Julian Matthews looks at the recent case law on psychiatric injury for nervous shock, where there appears to have been a tightening of the relevant control mechanisms ‘Cases of clinical negligence present particularly difficult problems. The factual background of cases can be very different and often quite complex. The nature and timing of the “event” …

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Psychiatric Injury: Taking a look at secondary victim claims ‘de Novo’

Charles Bagot analyses a quartet of new cases produced in the period since December 2014 ‘Some of the decisions in the 21 years between Alcock in 1992 and Taylor in 2013 are difficult to reconcile with one another and have made it harder to find a consistent thread through this line of cases.’ This article …

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Psychiatric Injury: ‘Nervous shock’ – where are we now?

Andrew Hogarth QC analyses the recent approach of the courts to compensate primary and secondary victims ‘The acceptance by courts that some unmeritorious primary victims can succeed has led inevitably to a desire to ensure that secondary victims who are considered by the trial judge to be meritorious will succeed.’ Most would agree that the …

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Case Report: Jones v Ramshaw [2011] (unreported 5 September 2011)

Liability; psychiatric injury; secondary victims The judge preferred the claimant’s psychiatrist’s diagnosis of PTSD over the defendant’s psychiatrist’s diagnosis of deep grief.This case provides an illuminating consideration of the scope of liability in this difficult area of law. Facts On 2 November 2006, the claimant’s daughter was one of four teenage girls in the back …

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