An orthopaedic surgeon was ordered by a Quebec court to pay a Quebec City man $100,000 in non-pecuniary damages after he was found to be at fault for one of three back surgeries he performed on the patient.
The family of a non-smoker who died of lung cancer at the age of 44 was awarded $1.7 million after the Quebec Court of Appeal held that two doctors were negligent in a case that draws on the rarely used notion of “unfavourable inference” of proof of causation, a development applauded by medical malpractice legal experts.
In a ruling that highlights the difficulty of proving the causal link between medical negligence and a patient’s damage in a civil suit, the Quebec Court of Appeal overturned a lower court ruling because it failed to apply negative inference, a “robust and pragmatic approach” that is sometimes wrongly confused with a reversal of burden of proof. Quebec courts have rarely applied unfavourable inference.