Case comments analyze decisions of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, the Court of Appeal for Ontario, and other Canadian courts in medical malpractice litigation. Each post takes a single decision and works through what happened, how the court applied the standard of care, causation, and damages frameworks to the facts, what the expert evidence said, and what the practical implications are for similar future claims.
The archive covers Ontario civil decisions across the full range of medical malpractice practice: obstetric and birth injury cases, missed and delayed diagnoses, surgical and anaesthetic errors, hospital negligence, informed consent claims, and procedural matters such as limitation periods and expert evidence challenges. It also includes appellate decisions from outside Ontario where the reasoning is likely to be persuasive in Ontario courts, particularly from the Supreme Court of Canada and the appellate courts of British Columbia.
Case comments are written for two audiences. Practising lawyers, law students, and judicial researchers can use them as a working library of recent Ontario medical malpractice doctrine. Prospective clients and patients can use them to see how courts have approached fact patterns similar to their own. The substance is the same for both audiences; only the framing of the takeaway changes.
Posts in this category are organized by the tags applied to each comment, allowing readers to filter by clinical specialty, legal concept, court, or outcome.
A BC court certified a class action against a hospital that allegedly hired an imposter nurse. Some causes of action were certified; others were left to individual claims.
A trial judge dismissed a medical malpractice claim against two ER physicians, finding the standard of care was met and that earlier testing would not have changed the outcome.
Three physicians on a multi-disciplinary team failed to obtain informed consent for an elective AVM procedure. The Court of Appeal upheld an $8.5M judgment.
A community hospital ER physician failed to insist on the urgent transfer of a patient with a pulseless limb. The trial judge found liability for the lost leg.
A trial judge found an obstetrician applied excessive traction during a shoulder dystocia, causing a permanent brachial plexus injury. Liability was established.
A family physician identified a high-risk twin pregnancy and started a referral letter that was never sent. The Alberta Court of King’s Bench found liability.
A defendant physician accessed his former patient’s hospital records during litigation. The Divisional Court remitted the CPSO disposition for reconsideration.
A medication error caused real distress but no compensable mental injury. The Court of Appeal applied the Saadati threshold and dismissed the claim.
A negligent stroke discharge that failed at causation. The Ontario Court of Appeal upheld the dismissal of the action, despite an admitted breach of standard of care.
An Ontario decision applying the Wigmore test to protect hospital quality of care review documents from production, even where the documents were relevant.
A Manitoba decision in which a physician was found negligent without expert evidence, illustrating the narrow common-sense exception under ter Neuzen v Korn.
The Court of Appeal upholds the use of epidemiological evidence to infer causation across a class of patients harmed by a physician’s IPAC failures.
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