The Investigations Undertaken as part of a Claim

Children injured at birth may, in some cases, have suffered catastrophic injury. If this is the case, in most cases, the child will need a lifetime of support and unfortunately may well never be able to live independently.

Part of the investigation that we carry out as part of a claim involves dealing with a range of professionals from different specialisms to assess the different areas and level of support that a child is going to need both now and in the future to be able to assess the cost of that support.

We work with

• Neurologists - in the first instance to assess the level of brain injury that has been sustained by a child
• Care and case management professionals – they provide support to parents, organise carers and therapies and generally help to check that things are running smoothly for the family
• Physiotherapists – to investigate and assess the level of exercise that a child may need to have now and in the future
• Occupational therapists – they assess a child’s equipment needs, which may be quite considerable
• Speech and Language therapists  - we  discuss equipment that may be required to assist with a child’s communication – this would include speech if possible for the child, but if not we look at assistive technologies – such as using computer equipment to help in communication with both people and the world at large
• Specialist architects to discuss adapting a child’s existing home or indeed purchasing or building a new one

We also assess, with the experts, what additional accommodation may need to be provided such as

• A wet room
• Therapy room
• Extra size bedroom / bed
• Equipment store

The ongoing cost of all of this inevitably means that for catastrophic birth injury cases the settlement of the claim is very often millions of pounds.