The High Court has awarded James Kinsella €40,000 for post-traumatic stress disorder arising from the immediate aftermath of a medication overdose negligently administered to his wife at a hospital in Beaumont.
The hospital admitted that on July 20, 2021 it gave Mrs Kinsella 80mg of Lercanidipine, a blood-pressure drug for which her usual daily dose was 10mg and normal maximum dose was 20mg. The overdose caused a sudden and catastrophic medical event.
Mr Kinsella was brought to the hospital shortly afterwards. He described finding his wife unconscious with black material coming from her mouth, which was charcoal used to counteract the overdose. On leaving, he collapsed and required assessment in the emergency department.
Mrs Kinsella later suffered cardiac arrests and died on August 2, 2021. The court accepted uncontroverted psychiatric evidence that Mr Kinsella’s acute stress reaction began with the events of July 20 and later developed into PTSD, although subsequent events reinforced that initial trauma.
The hospital argued that nervous shock law did not extend to a medical mishap of this kind, that the injury arose from a continuum of grief rather than one shocking event and that no duty of care was owed to a patient’s spouse.
Mr Justice Tony O’Connor rejected those arguments. He held that an “accident” for the purposes of Kelly v Hennessy is not confined to road or industrial accidents. The overdose was sudden, unintended, externally caused and capable of producing an immediate shocking sensory impact.
The judge also found sufficient legal proximity between the hospital and Mr Kinsella because he arrived during the immediate aftermath, directly perceived the ongoing consequences and physically collapsed while the hospital still controlled the crisis it had caused.
The ruling was expressly confined to those facts and did not establish a general duty by hospitals to patients’ relatives.
Mr Kinsella received €40,000 general damages, in addition to an agreed €61,368 dependency claim under the Civil Liability Act 1961.