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Law Bulletin - January 2007

Assaults on nursing staff in high security hospitals

An NHS trust was negligent in not implementing policies recommended by the Safety and Security in Ashworth, Broadmoor and Rampton Hospital Directions 2000. This case arose from  Rampton Hospital.

Had they carried out the compulsory risk assessment on all patients in line with that policy they should have concluded that the patient presented a high immediate risk of causing serious injury to others and followed the policy of confining her in her room at night with the result that a member of staff would not have been assaulted.

In the event, the patient was able to move at night to the ward office and assault the member of staff.

Buck & Ors -v- Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust (2006) [2006] EWCA Civ 1576

Vibration White Finger Cases

We have had another success where our experts have been preferred to defendant’s experts at Cardiff County Court. In this case, Mr Tudor Davies’ medical evidence was preferred to that of the defendant expert and our engineer Nicholas Hill was preferred to the defendant engineer.

The defendant engineer did not carry out any vibration measurements with the actual tools the claimant worked with and had applied an 80 per cent deduction to allow for the tendency of the claimant generally to “exaggerate” anger time, which the trial judge considered far too high.

In this case the exposure arguably fell below 2.8ms2 but the trial Judge still found the employer’s duty to give warnings and take steps to reduce vibration where exposure fell between 1 and 2.8ms2 was emphasised.

Ford v Corus