CET feedback: Litigation and the practitioner

This exercise centred around your discussion of the following scenario:

An optometrist in your place of practice (not part of an NHS hospital), having obtained informed consent, instils a cycloplegic instead of the consented topical anaesthetic for the purpose of performing contact tonometry on the right eye of the patient. The subsequent pupil dilation precipitates an angle closure attack resulting in the patient having to attend the local eye casualty department, and being admitted for treatment.

You are approached by the patient after being discharged from the hospital, who wants to know what legal action they can take against the optometrist, stating that they have suffered considerable distress, incurred costs and significant loss of earnings as a result of the time off work due to the optometrist’s action. In addition to this the right eye now has a best corrected acuity of 6/9 (NIPH) instead of the 6/6 that the patient had before the incident as detailed in the patients’ optometric records.