Mother sues NHS for not revealing she could have killer dad’s brain disease

A WOMAN whose father killed her mother would not have had a child if doctors had told her he was suffering from a brain condition she later inherited, a court heard yesterday.

Now in her 40s, she is suing three NHS trusts over claims they had a duty of care to reveal that her father had Huntington’s disease.

The woman cannot be named for legal reasons and was referred to in the High Court as ABC. Yesterday’s hearing was told how in 2007 her father shot and killed her mother and was convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Huntington’s disease – an inherited condition that often damages brain cells and causes disruption to movement, cognition and behaviour – can lead to the sufferer becoming aggressive. It cannot be reversed or slowed and there is a 50 per cent chance a parent will pass it on to their child.

Medical staff sought the father’s consent to disclose his diagnosis to his daughter, who was pregnant at the time, but he refused. ABC was told about it only by accident four months after her daughter was born.

ABC herself was diagnosed with Huntington’s in January 2013 but does not yet know whether her young daughter is affected.

She is now suing St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust in south London, St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust and Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust for nearly £350,000 in damages. Opening the case, her barrister Lizanne Gumbel QC said her client was ‘entirely certain’ she would have terminated her pregnancy had she been informed of her father’s condition.

‘This is hardly surprising when she knows how the disease has affected her father and believes it is likely to have contributed to her father killing her mother,’ she added.

She told the court her client had ‘suffered severe psychiatric damage as a result of learning after she had given birth to her daughter that she herself had the abnormal Huntington’s gene and that her daughter also had a 50 per cent prospect of inheriting the abnormal gene’.

ABC told Mrs Justice Yip: ‘If I was given the information, as I should have been, I would have made the decision to test and terminate to not put my child through this.’

Describing the moment she was told she had the disease, she said: ‘I thought I was about to die, I thought I was about to get unwell immediately, I thought I would drop my baby… I terrified myself.’

In written submissions, Philip Havers QC said on behalf of the three NHS trusts that the question for the court was whether there was ‘a duty to disclose to her confidential information about her father against his express wishes’.

He added that ABC ‘was not entitled to confidential information held by the defendants in the context of their doctor-patient relationship’ with her father.

Mr Havers said imposing a duty of care in this situation would create ‘a direct conflict between the duty of confidence owed by the doctor to his patient and the alleged duty of care owed to the third party’.

The case was first argued at the High Court in 2015 when a judge ruled a full hearing should not go ahead. It was reversed by the Court of Appeal in 2017. The latest case is set to be heard over eight days, with closing submissions in January.