Easing the pain of doctors' damage

A TYPICAL day for Angela Curran is marked by contrasts. She gets up, gives the kids their breakfasts amid the bustle of a typical family home and ferries them to school, just like any normal mum. Then she arrives at work, in the sanitised environment of Irwin Mitchell solicitors, on Newcastle's Grey Street, where she is often faced with a very different perspective of parenthood from her own.

As a clinical negligence specialist with a particular interest in birth trauma, people come to her whose children have suffered often severe injuries in hospitals and doctors' and dentists' surgeries. Angela, 42, who has seven-year-old twin daughters and an 11-year-old son, knows better than most the devastating effect this can have on families.

"I often see children who are damaged at the worst end of the spectrum, needing 24-hour care. Families go from being quite stable financially to being on the breadline. Some people come in quickly after the event while other people wait a long time. One woman came to see me whose brain damaged daughter was 24 and she was starting to get concerned about who would look after her."

Originally a teacher, Angela, who is divorced and lives in Chester-le-Street, started on her current career path by chance. "I did science at university then a teacher training certificate and worked in Chester-le-Street and Durham for a number of years teaching chemistry. I thought I would do a correspondence course as a hobby - I didn't have any interest in changing career. It was a vocational law qualification and I found I was getting really good marks and couldn't wait for the next instalment to arrive through the post. My husband said 'Why don't you send off some applications and see if someone will give you a job?'," she says.

Angela followed his advice, and the Newcastle-based firm Watson Burton offered to fund her through further training, with the promise of a position as a trainee solicitor at the end of it. When the clinical negligence specialist left, it was suggested that with her scientific background, she might like to replace her.

"I had done quite a lot of personal injury law and I used to work with coal miners' compensation claims quite a lot. I started to pull together a designated medical department within the personal injuries department."

She moved to Irwin Mitchell in 2003, completing a three-strong team specialising in different types of personal injury claims. She says processing a claim is an involved procedure.

"The first step is to get funding for the claimant. It's a little known fact that children are assessed in their own financial right for legal aid. The vast majority of children, unless they have a trust fund, will be eligible for it.

"Once I have got a certificate from the Legal Services Commission they will authorise me to get the child's records and get some expert opinion. I will go to experts outside the region and get them to comment on the records and tell me whether the care has been incompetent. Then we need to link the negligence to the damage," says Angela.

This is often a major stumbling block, especially when the stakes are high. "Proving that the negligence has caused the damage is often a battleground. If you are looking at a three or four million pound claim, it's not easy for someone to hold their hands up and admit everything."

The result can be months of legal wrangling, as happened in one of Angela's most high profile cases - that of Bethany Ruff. Born prematurely, Bethany was given inappropriate treatment for a chest condition at Newcastle's RVI, resulting in brain damage. The hospital contested the family's claim all the way and was finally ordered to pay compensation by the Court of Appeal.

As a solicitor, Angela does not represent clients in court but compiles all the evidence and instructs the barrister, usually a QC. This often involves her building up relationships with families like the Ruffs, for whom she says the whole process was "very difficult".

In some cases, litigation can be avoided by an out-of-court settlement but even then, things are far from straightforward. "Even if I think the settlement is perfectly reasonable I have to OK it with the Court of Protection in London. Then I go in front of a judge in the High Court in Newcastle," she says.

WHILE accepting that with the proliferation of 'no win, no fee' solicitors, litigation has never been more popular, Angela says she's never come across anyone whose grievance wasn't genuine.

"Inevitably, you have got to have had some medical treatment that's gone wrong to come and see me. It may be that I have to tell people that there's no remedy in law but I don't think I've ever had to say 'What are you doing here? You're wasting my time'."

Paradoxically, although she often finds herself fighting the medical profession, her job has given her an insight into how difficult being a doctor can be. She says: "I think people expect perfection from the medical profession at times."

Angela says that she was once so overcome with sympathy for a young accident and emergency doctor at an inquest that she felt compelled to go and commiserate with him. "He just looked absolutely devastated."

Her natural aptitude for dealing with people (it was this that convinced her to be a solicitor rather than a barrister) has led Angela into the field of mediation. "It's basically a conciliatory process where you bring a neutral third party into a dispute. I started doing it in 1996 and I've done all sorts of cases over the years but in the last few years, I've done predominantly medical negligence cases," she says.

As one of the top three most experienced mediators in the domain in the UK, she has been involved in setting up a pilot scheme at Newcastle County Court and also teaches mediation.

She believes it's a valuable tool in resolving disputes. "The success rate is marvellous. Eighty per cent or more settle on the day or a few days after and it has a high satisfaction rate."

But not everyone is cut out to be a mediator, as Angela has discovered. "I used to say about teaching that you can either teach or you can't and I'm beginning to think that about mediation."

Whether she's walking a tightrope between two warring factions or listening to a distraught parent pour their heart out, Angela's overriding aim is to help people. She finds her experience as a mother invaluable, often considering how she would feel if it were her child. Indeed, by a strange quirk of fate, her own son suffered the same chest infection as Bethany Ruff and needed hospital treatment, adding to her sense of connection with the family.

With her openness and down-to-earth manner, it's easy to imagine Angela winning people's trust and relating to them as a real person, as opposed to a cold, clinical professional. "People say they don't want someone who doesn't get upset, they want someone to get involved but you've got to not let your emotions cloud things. You do what you can to help people - even if I can't get them compensation, they can be given advice on a number of issues that on a practical level, will make their lives better. There are very few people that I can't give something to," she says.