Is there a New Duty to Warn Family Members in English Medical Law? ABC V ST George’s Healthcare NHS Trust and Others [2020] EWHC 455

Extract

I. INTRODUCTION

This is a commentary on the third legal chapter in the unfortunate story of ABC (‘the claimant’), a single mother who sued her father’s doctor for his failure to warn her—during her pregnancy—of the risk that she might have, or be a carrier of, an untreatable and invariably fatal genetic disease. When, after the birth of her child, she discovered that she did have the disease, she said that the clinicians’ failure had deprived her of the opportunity (which she said she would have taken) to terminate the pregnancy. She claimed damages for the continuation of her pregnancy, for psychiatric damage, and for consequential losses.

A brief reminder of the previous two chapters. In the first, the claimant contended that her father’s doctor owed her a duty of care—which meant a duty to inform her of the father’s diagnosis. In the second chapter the High Court struck out the claim, saying that there was no duty.² The Court of Appeal disagreed, holding that in principle, doctors—at least in the field of clinical genetics—could owe a duty to a patient’s relatives.³