The High Court ordered the Health Service Executive (HSE) to pay consultant surgeon Ibrahim Ahmed €300,000 in damages after finding it had breached his employment contract. The court also declared that he had been employed on a contract of indefinite duration since 30 June 2004. It did not order the HSE to make him another appointment.
The judgment, delivered by Miss Justice Laffoy on 29 August 2007, followed a four-day hearing in July on issues left open by an earlier liability judgment. The court had previously found that the HSE breached the contract by failing to offer Ahmed an appropriate alternative appointment after surgical services at Louth County Hospital were reorganised.
The remaining questions were whether the breach continued, whether the HSE should be ordered to make an alternative offer, and how much damages were due. The HSE offered Ahmed a permanent consultant surgeon post at Navan Hospital in July 2006. He began work there on 5 February 2007, initially on a temporary, without-prejudice basis. The proposed contract provided for 11 weekly sessions at Navan, including elective and emergency work, on-call duties and private practice under the Consultants’ Common Contract.
Ahmed argued the Navan post was not an appropriate alternative because he could not perform major surgery there, as he had at Louth County Hospital. The HSE said the contract did not guarantee access to a particular kind of surgical facility. The judge found that the Navan appointment was appropriate and that the HSE’s breach ended in early February 2007, when Ahmed could take up the post on full remuneration and engage in private practice with the ability to register with VHI. She said he had no contractual right to insist on involvement in major surgery at that time.
The judge declined to order the HSE to make another appointment. She said the organisation of regional surgical services involved practical and resource decisions that the court could not confidently direct, and that the appropriate course for disputes about deployment and access to surgery was to use the contract’s internal grievance procedures.
The court awarded €235,000 for income loss up to 30 June 2007 and €65,000 for future loss, finding the loss continued after the breach ended but rejecting the larger future-loss estimate. It refused general damages because there was no evidence of a clinical medical condition caused by the breach, and rejected aggravated and exemplary damages. The total award was €300,000.