Ex-prisoner wins cancer compensation
It has been revealed that an ex-prisoner has won her right to a compensation claim award, after her breast cancer went undetected in jail.
The south-west London woman has won her High Court professional negligence battle, over the prison service’s failure not to spot her cancer whilst behind bars.
She sued the Ministry of Justice for damages over treatment she received in Cookham Wood Prison in Kent in 2005.
She alleges that on three separate occasions - between March, April and May – she consulted a medical officer about a lump in her right breast and did not get a response consistent with the exercise of all reasonable care and skill.
Counsel Paula Sparks stated that if the 34-year-old inmate had received the correct care, then she would have been sent for specialist treatment, thus access to a better prognosis than the one she got.
She was eventually referred by her GP in November that year, after her release. The Ministry of Justice has denied public liability and noted that they were not in breach of duty and that the prisoner received reasonable care.
The sitting judge, Sir Christopher Holland, stated there was no reason not to regard the Brixton inmate as a potentially truthful, reliable witness whose character had matured as a result of the trauma she had been though.
He found she did complain of a breast lump on her third visit to a prison doctor in May and that there was a question mark over that doctor's history taking.
“I am entirely satisfied that the exercise of reasonable care and skill demanded the taking of a history that would have elicited the fact of earlier consultations and established the locus of the possible lump,” he said.
He furthered that if it had been done, the doctor concerned should and would have made the prisoner the subject of a 'non urgent' referral to a breast clinic - to be seen by the beginning of July - and a failure to do so was “in breach of duty and negligent.”
Holland encouraged a settlement to be reached due to the woman’s deteriorating health and the cost on the public purse. He commented: “The sooner this matter is resolved from her point of view the better.”
However, issues of causation and the amount of the award was adjourned to an unspecified date by the judge, who refused the Ministry permission to appeal, although it can renew its application before the Court of Appeal.
Frivolous claims
Compensation claim payouts reached nearly £9 million in 2006 alone, so the figure predicted for 2009-2010 is millions more.
The large scale of handouts to inmates who claimed they were unfairly treated in the prison system is well on the rise.
At Leicester Prison, one con was awarded £1,750 for a personal injury suffered whilst playing sport. Another similar claim by a Cardiff prisoner brought a £1,200 pounds in compensation payment.
A Prison Service spokesman commented that high cost claims that are settled during a given year can misrepresent the total amount of settlement money.
Updated on 2/22/2010