Database

With new risks proposed every week liability risk managers soon develop ways to filter out the noise. By adopting a systematic approach the filtering process can be refined in the light of feedback and can be inspected by the enterprise risk manager and others. A brief introduction to a systematic approach is provided here: Practical Emerging Risk . Once a subject has been evaluated by the risk manager, it doesn’t need to be re-evaluated until the trigger condition is satisfied. Practical Emerging Risk  

Evidence from: The December 2012 issue of the Radar journal. In a nut shell, the normal neck is to varying degrees defective. Most of us just ignore it. It comes and goes. Normal defect does not often count as a motoring injury unless a person is examined after a not-at-fault car crash. At that point, the observed defect is an injury and what’s more, it was caused by the car crash!  At-fault drivers are many times less likely to be described as injured. The problem has been that expert examiners have had no common-law-compatible method for distinguishing between normal and probably abnormal. They have had no tools for assessing, from a common law point of view, whether there is an injury or not. So, they use a medical approach instead. Medics are in effect precautionary, rather than reasonable, and trusting rather than probabilistic. This approach is acceptable for broken bones, but is of doubtful relevance to the common law when the actual defect is commonplace and normal. Insurance c

Evidence from: A symposium for Civil Service ‘Horizon Scanners’ and decision-makers. Shrivenham 15th Jan 2013. Remit: How to get more attention [and funding] from decision-makers?   Tuesday was my first taste of a ‘Horizon Scanners’ symposium. It was free to attend. Thank you to CSaP University of Cambridge. Two approaches to “Horizon Scanning” were evident. One approach develops a deterministic model of the current landscape, identifies the different drivers that make sense and to which there is a measured vulnerability. This approach is probably best described as evidence-based resilience testing with targeted enquiry to identify when priority threats and opportunities are emerging. I wouldn’t call it horizon scanning I would call it risk management. An excellent example of this is the National Institute for Health Research Horizon Scanning Centre and of course, the Radar service. The second collects opinions based essentially on strongl

Evidence from: Managing Injuries of the Neck Trial (MINT): a randomised controlled trial of treatments for whiplash injuries. Health Technol Assess 2012;16(49). People were diagnosed at ED assessment with whiplash grade I to III. They were randomised to receive the Whiplash Book (developed for an ABI evidence-based guidance project) and or a combination of physiotherapy or neither. 18% went on the have persistent whiplash. Overall, there was no measurable effect of any intervention at 12 months. Those still in trouble at 3 weeks post accident did benefit very marginally at 4 months. Having assessed the cost, the authors concluded that: from a healthcare perspective, the physiotherapy package was not cost-effective at current levels of willingness to pay Comment: The medical test of benefit and the medical test of cost effectiveness are both more generous than would be expected at common law; where the balance of probabilities is used to judge facts. Applying the common law standard, th

Evidence from: Neutral Citation Number: [2012] EWHC 2936 (QB) Case No: HQ09X03547 JEFFREY JONES AND OTHERS – and – THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR ENERGY AND CLIMATE CHANGE – and – COAL PRODUCTS LIMITED The claimants failed to establish that carcinogenesis is a cumulative disease process when viewed under the lens of legal causation. Paradoxically most medical experts agree that the mechanism does in fact involve an accumulation of DNA damage but this does not influence the legal thinking. 1) the disease can occur with no external exposure 2) when multiple carcinogens are present in the environment increased risk of DNA damage arising from one exposure does not mean that the cancer was actually caused by that given source of exposure. 3) any threshold test of material risk would at present be arbitrary. The case reverses a growing sense that any contribution to the risk of indivisible harm could be found liable for 100% of the damages, as appeared to be the case in B

A group of six scientists and a government official are facing six years in jail for manslaughter after providing “an incomplete, inept, unsuitable and criminally mistaken” assessment of risks posed by what turned out to be the devastating L’Aquila earthquake. They had met  a few days before the damaging quake and ruled that it was impossible to determine whether the (recent small) tremors would be followed soon by a large quake. The prosecutor Mr Picuti told the court that the defendants had provided “an incomplete, inept, unsuitable and criminally mistaken” analysis which gave the residents of L’Aquila a false sense of security. Evidence from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/9626075/LAquila-earthquake-scientists-sentenced-to-six-years-in-jail.html Comment Various comments suggest that given the data and relevant theories  the inconclusive finding of the committee was among the range of opinions that could have been reasonably formed. It is suggested that the fa