The respondents sued the appellant hospital and several doctors for medical malpractice following the birth of their daughter, who suffered severe brain damage due to asphyxia during labour.
The trial judge dismissed the claims against the doctors but found the hospital vicariously liable for its nurses' failure to properly monitor the fetal heart rate between 6:30 and 7:00 p.m.
The trial judge inferred that proper monitoring would have detected the asphyxia, leading to an expedited delivery that would have spared the child's injuries.
The Court of Appeal allowed the hospital's appeal and ordered a new trial, finding that the trial judge misapplied the law of causation by using a 'robust and pragmatic approach' to infer causation without reviewing and making necessary findings on conflicting expert evidence regarding whether the earlier period of asphyxia was actually detectable by intermittent auscultation.
