Taylor Vs Somerset Health Authority

Establishing a limited time frame for the claimant to recover damages is severely restrictive as hours or minutes should not be a relevant factor in situations involving the death of a beloved person. In Taylor v Somerset Health Authority, the claim for damages failed despite the claimant learning of the victim’s death within minutes. This requirement is seen as undeveloped as the trauma of losing a loved one does not make any difference regardless of the time limit. It is foreseeable that viewing the gruesome sight of a dead body might cause a psychiatric illness, even more so when the immediate victim had a close relationship with the claimant. Despite witnessing the death of the victim, it may not be sufficient for the claimant to recover damages if not deemed close enough to the event caused by the negligence, as seen in Taylor v A Novo. The case of Galli-Atkinson v Seghal saw a mother’s
The confusion regarding the primary victim is evidence that this proposal would improve the law. Lord Lloyd’s definition made the reasonable foreseeability of physical injury a prerequisite of liability that the primary victim must show. As a result, a person who has suffered psychiatric illness but was never at risk of physical harm cannot be defined as a primary victim. This person would also face difficulties in recovering as a secondary victim if there was no other person physically involved in the accident as the immediate victim. The distinction suggests that physical injury deserves more legal support than psychiatric illness and this has been rejected by medical professionals. The law should be framed in such a way that as long as the psychiatric illness was caused by the defendant’s negligence and it is recognised by medical evidence, the claimant should be entitled to recover