The Supreme Court of Canada is getting set to hear a medical negligence lawsuit involving a local doctor and a patient who had to have her kidney removed.
Karen Armstrong was awarded $1.3 million following the original trial in which Justice Gregory M. Mulligan found Dr. Colin Ward to have negligently caused her injuries.
But in December 2019, Justice David M. Paciocco, writing for the majority of the Ontario Court of Appeal three-person panel, found that the trial judge erred in defining the standard of care the doctor had to meet, “improperly establishing a standard of perfection” and allowed Ward’s appeal, dismissing the action against him.
In February 2010, Ward removed Armstrong’s colon using laparoscopic surgery at Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre in Barrie. In the weeks that followed, she experienced abdominal pain and a CT scan revealed that her ureter — which carries urine from the kidneys to the bladder — was blocked with scar tissue, causing severe damage to her left kidney which was removed the following October, according to court documents.
In her lawsuit, Armstrong, a registered nurse who once worked in the hospital’s dialysis unit, alleged that the doctor caused the scar tissue by improperly using a cauterizing device during the colectomy, known as a LigaSure. She said he came within two millimetres of her ureter with the device, causing a thermal injury.
Ward denied that he breached the standard of care expected of him as a surgeon. He countered that he took the steps that Armstrong’s expert surgeon said a reasonably prudent surgeon would take and the trial judge should have therefore dismissed Armstrong’s claim.
The Supreme Court has been asked to address issues around the standard of care in this case which is considered precedent-setting.
The case is scheduled to be heard Jan. 18.
