The High Court has held that a father who witnessed a negligently managed labour and his son's resuscitation cannot claim as a secondary victim, because what he saw was a medical crisis, not an accident.
Key facts
- Who: A father whose claim for psychiatric injury, after witnessing his son's birth, was struck out; the ruling applies the Supreme Court's decision on secondary victims
- From: Judgment of 17 March 2026
- Source: MIM v Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust [2026] EWHC 562 (KB)
In MIM v Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust [2026] EWHC 562 (KB), Her Honour Judge Claire Evans, sitting as a Judge of the High Court in the King's Bench Division at Manchester, gave judgment on 17 March 2026 after a hearing on 5 March 2026.
Background
The claimant, referred to as MIM, stayed with his wife throughout her labour at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, which the Trust runs, in late May and early June 2020. His son was born at 09:47 on 1 June 2020 in poor condition. The baby needed resuscitation and then therapeutic cooling in the neonatal intensive care unit. MIM developed an adjustment disorder.
The Trust admitted negligence. The CTG trace (the monitor of the baby's heart rate) was deteriorating, and the baby should have been delivered at 09:30 rather than 09:47. It admitted that delivery by 09:41 to 09:44 would have avoided all injury.
The question
The Trust applied to strike out the claim, or alternatively for summary judgment. The court had to decide whether MIM had any prospect of succeeding as a secondary victim after the Supreme Court's decision in Paul v Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust [2024] UKSC 1. For the purposes of the hearing, the Trust's counsel accepted that if MIM could establish that he witnessed an "accident", the application must fail.
The decision
The court struck out the claim under CPR 3.4(2)(a). It held that the facts as pleaded disclose no legally recognisable claim.
The reasoning
The judge first asked how an ordinary person would see events. They would say MIM witnessed labour and the birth of an injured son, which is a negligently caused medical crisis rather than an accident.
She then applied Paul, where an accident means an unexpected and unintended event that causes injury, or a risk of injury, by violent external means. It must be a discrete event, happening at a particular time, in a particular place and in a particular way. The pleaded "continuum" of events suggested the opposite. The monitor alarm sounding during labour was not itself unexpected or unintended and was not the direct cause of the injury. The injury arose from a period of hypoxia during labour and birth.
The judge did not accept the argument that MIM saw both the negligence and the outcome in a short time. Paul found that a secondary victim need not witness events close in time to the negligence. On the argument that everything done in managing the mother was external to the baby, she held that it did not assist MIM: there was still no accident, no accident happened to the mother, and the ordinary workings of her body could not be described as an accident in any normal sense.
She added that Paul does not bar every secondary victim claim arising from clinical negligence. Whether a claimant witnessed an accident or a medical crisis is decided on the facts of each case. She expressed sympathy to the family and said the strike-out did not minimise the seriousness of the negligence.
What this means for relatives of patients
The court held that admitted negligence does not by itself make a claim by a secondary victim possible. Such a claim depends on witnessing an accident as Paul defines it, and here the court treated the events of labour and birth as a medical crisis. The judge stressed that each case turns on its own facts, so anyone unsure where they stand should check the details of their situation with a legal adviser.
Sources
- MIM v Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust [2026] EWHC 562 (KB), High Court (King's Bench Division), 17 March 2026: https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/kb/2026/562