MIM v Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

For a secondary-victim psychiatric-injury claim arising from clinical negligence, the claimant must have witnessed an accident causing, or having the capacity to cause, injury to the primary victim. An accident must be a discrete, unexpected and unintended external event capable of being identified by reference to a particular time, place and manner. Witnessing a negligently caused medical crisis, including injury developing during the ordinary bodily process of labour and birth, does not satisfy that requirement merely because the negligence and injury were closely connected in time. Whether a clinical event is an accident or a medical crisis remains fact-sensitive, and exceptional clinical-negligence claims may still succeed where the facts disclose an accident.

MIM claimed damages for psychiatric injury after witnessing the negligently managed labour and birth of his son. The Defendant admitted that the labour should have been expedited and that the delay caused the child’s acute profound hypoxic brain injury. MIM remained present throughout the labour and delivery and pleaded that the alarms, confusion, deterioration and emergency delivery constituted an external traumatic event.

The Defendant applied to strike out the claim under CPR 3.4(2)(a), alternatively for summary judgment. The central issue was whether the pleaded events amounted to an accident of the kind required for recovery by a secondary victim following Paul v Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust [2024] UKSC 1.

1. Application granted. The Particulars of Claim disclosed no legally recognisable secondary-victim claim and were struck out under CPR 3.4(2)(a).
2. Following Paul v Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust [2024] UKSC 1, a secondary victim must have witnessed an accident which caused, or had the capacity to cause, injury to the primary victim. Reading the Supreme Court’s judgment as a whole, the requirement is not satisfied by witnessing illness or injury developing as a medical crisis.
3. An accident is a discrete event capable of being identified as occurring at a particular time, place and in a particular way. This requirement provides clarity and legal certainty. The pleaded description of a continuing sequence, or continuum, during which MIM became increasingly fearful and the child was eventually delivered injured, was inconsistent with that concept.
4. The alarms, the perceived confusion among staff, the delay in delivery and the child’s subsequent resuscitation did not constitute an unexpected and unintended external event causing injury. The alarm was not itself the cause of the injury. The injury resulted from hypoxia arising during the bodily process of labour and birth.
5. The close temporal connection pleaded between the admitted negligence and the injury did not distinguish the case from Paul. The Supreme Court had held that closeness in time between the defendant’s breach and the accident or injury was not required. Nor did the fact that management of the mother was external to the baby establish that an accident had occurred.
6. [2024] UKSC 1 left open whether particular hypothetical clinical-negligence scenarios might constitute accidents. That preserved a fact-sensitive possibility of rare successful claims, but did not assist MIM because the pleaded facts were a medical crisis rather than an accident.