73-year-old Gillian Chapman has made headlines by saying “she does not want compensation from the NHS [National Health Service] over the death of her husband, a GP who contracted cancer after working in a hospital that was built using asbestos.” Notes Telegraph columnist Jemima Lewis: “The cult of compensation has had no obvious improvement on [NHS] services.”
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The suit would have been about asbestos, not malpractice in the NHS. The error in the analysis is the presumption that asbestos contributed to the doctor’s cancer. One would doubt that the doctor helped with the construction of or that he did maintenance work in the hospital where he worked, so the doctor’s exposure would have been near absolute zero.
One would expect a spike in asbestos caused cancer from the Liberty Ship program just as one would expect a spike in deaths from gun shot wounds during World War II. The survivors of the Liberty Ship program are very old and Plaintiff lawyers have been getting payments based on minute exposures. It is crazy!
I don’t remember the details, but some years ago a yacht went aground off the East Coast in circumstances in which liability might have been imputed to the Coast Guard (I think that it was claimed that navigational buoys were misplaced or something like that). When the owners were asked if they planned to sue, they responded: “Oh, no. We’re Canadian”.