It’s arrived! Relational Autonomy Comes to Court: ABC v ST George’s Healthcare NHS Trust [2017] EWCA 336

This note concerns the first case to reach the English courts regarding the duty of clinicians to communicate genetic information to a patient’s relatives. In 2015, the High Court struck out a claim by a patient’s daughter against her father’s doctors, holding that they neither owed her a common law duty of care nor breached Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.¹ The Court of Appeal (Gloster, Underhill, and Irwin LJJ) unanimously reversed the High Court’s decision and allowed the case to proceed to trial.² This decision, which we support, might have substantial ramifications for English medical law.

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In 2007, the patient shot and killed his wife. He was convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He was made the subject of a hospital order under Section...