Warby and Dean speak on privacy for victims of clinical negligence
5RB’s Mark Warby QC and Jacob Dean are guest speakers at a conference organised by Action Against Medical Accidents (AvMA), at the Royal Armouries, Leeds, on 21 June 2013.
AvMA is the charity for patient safety and justice. This is their 25th Annual Clinical Negligence Conference.
Warby and Dean will be speaking on Retaining Confidentiality and Anonymity for your Clients. As the clash between open justice and the privacy rights of litigants (and witnesses) continues to exercise the courts, in a variety of contexts, they will be focusing on how the conflict is currently being addressed in cases of clinical negligence.
They will explore the relevance to clinical negligence cases of the developing Article 8 jurisprudence, and examine a series of decisions in which the Queen’s Bench Division has considered applications to anonymise clinical negligence claimants, or prohibit their identification.
In A v Cambridge University Hospital NHS Trust and MXB v East Sussex, for instance, the court has prohibited reporting of identities, or anonymised claimants, to protect private and family life and to prevent the purpose of the proceedings from being defeated. Among the questions that arise are how far can this approach be pressed, and in what other contexts might it be deployed?