The High Court has found Tallaght University Hospital primarily responsible for a sterile services technician’s finger injury after accepting that she had to stack a heavy instrument tray in a cramped, nearly full storage rack. The court attributed one-third contributory negligence to the employee and two-thirds responsibility to the hospital.
The judgment concerns a workplace accident on 23 August 2016. The employee, Susan Redmond, was placing a tray of instruments on a rack in the hospital’s Central Sterile Services Department when she felt a prick in her left index finger and pulled her hand back. The tray came down on her finger, causing a crush injury. The parties had agreed the amount of compensation, subject to the outcome on liability.
Mr Justice Mícheál P. O’Higgins accepted Ms Redmond’s account that the rack was busy and there was space only on the middle stack. He found the gap tight, with little room above or beside the tray, and accepted that she reached back to steady it before the injury. A medical note made two days later recorded both a crushed, swollen fingertip and a small puncture. The judge said the note and other contemporaneous records supported the consistency of her account.
The hospital disputed the account’s reliability, relying in part on automated records that showed no tray returned through the cleaning hatch and on the absence of an immediate report. The judge found Ms Redmond honest and credible, though her recollection of times and what happened to the tray afterward was uncertain. He said the tracking system depended on staff scanning items, so human error or oversight could not be excluded. Her failure to report the injury promptly was not decisive on liability because it occurred after she was injured, though the judge criticised the omission given the potential risk to staff and patients.
The court concluded that the cramped storage conditions on that day created an unnecessary and foreseeable risk. It found the hospital had breached its common law duty of care and identified material breaches of specified duties under section 8(2) of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005. The judge did not need to decide the wider engineering dispute about shelving design or guide rails. He also found the risk assessment should have given more attention to storage.
The judge found Ms Redmond should have recognised that the rack was nearly full and sought a trolley or inspection table, or asked management to clear space. Taking account of those failures and the hospital’s responsibility for the storage conditions, he assigned one-third liability to her and two-thirds to the hospital. The court did not set out a final damages order: it directed that submissions be heard on the terms of the final order and costs.