UK High Court Clarifies Limits of Secondary Victims Claims

The UK High Court in the recent case of MIM v. Sheffield Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust [2026] EWHC 562, has provided important clarification on secondary victim claims arising in a clinical setting. In this article, Yvonne Joyce, Partner, and Megan Bourton, Trainee Solicitor, examine the Court’s reasoning and its implications for future claims.

Background

The Claimant sought damages for psychiatric injury suffered as a result of witnessing the labour of his wife and delivery of his son, who due to the admitted negligence of the Defendant, was born requiring resuscitation having suffered an acute profound hypoxic brain injury.

Defendant’s Position

The Claimant, who was present throughout the labour and delivery, pleaded in his Particulars that what he witnessed amounted to an “external, traumatic, event which immediately caused injury to his son; the Claimant directly perceived the event and its immediate aftermath”.

The Defendant argued that nothing set out in the Particulars amounts to an “accident” as required by Paul v Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust [2024] UKSC 1. In that case, the Supreme Court held that for a secondary victim to successfully recover for psychiatric injury, the claimant must have witnessed an accident, and that an accident is defined as;  “an unexpected and unintended event which causes injury (or risk of injury) to a victim by violent external means.”  It was argued that what had occurred was a medical crisis or medical mishap rather than an accident.

The Claimant attempted to argue that what the claimant had witnessed and experienced did amount to an accident or alternatively, that it was not only an accident that could give rise to a claim from a secondary victim.

Judgment

Judge Claire Evans concluded that the ordinary person would view what the Claimant witnessed not as an accident, but a negligently caused medical crisis. She noted that the Supreme Court decision in Paul emphasises that an accident must be: “a discrete event…something which happens at a particular time, at a particular place, in a particular way”

Judge Evans noted that it was hard to see how it would be possible to draw any distinction between the failure to expedite the delivery of the Claimant’s son, which would have resulted in his son being born uninjured, and the failure to diagnose Mr. Paul’s coronary artery disease which would have then avoided his fatal cardiac arrest.  The Court found that as in the Paul case, the proposed secondary victim witnessed not an accident causing injury by external means, but a negligently caused medical crisis.

The Claimant’s claim was struck out as the Judge concluded that the facts as pleaded cannot amount to the witnessing of an accident as is required under UK law for the Claimant to be able to recover as a secondary victim.

Commentary

This UK decision reinforces the strict approach taken in Paul in relation to psychiatric  claims for secondary victims in the context of obstetric/birth injury cases.  It is clear that to succeed in a secondary victim claim, a Claimant must witness an accident.  A clinical deterioration or mismanagement during labour will ordinarily amount to a negligently caused medical crisis, not a discrete external event capable of meeting the definition of an accident.

Whether a similar approach to such a claim would be taken in Ireland  remains to be seen where the key consideration is not whether the secondary victim witnessed an “accident” but rather, whether the Plaintiff can satisfy the criteria set out in Kelly v Hennessy, including that the Defendant owed them a duty of care.