CASSIDY MINISTRY OF HEALTH [1951] 2 KB 343 The plaintiff entered hospital for an operation on his hand. After the operation the hand was put in a splint and kept bound up for 14 days. When the bandaging was removed the hand was found to be useless. It was not clear whether the fault lay with the surgeon or the doctors and nurses who had looked after him following the surgery. There were precedents for the view that doctors and consultants were not employees of the hospitals using their services. The following extracts are from the judgment of Denning LJ, delivered in the Court of Appeal, beginning at p 360:

doi:10.4324/9781843140504-69

Chapter

CASSIDY MINISTRY OF HEALTH [1951] 2 KB 343 The plaintiff entered hospital for an operation on his hand. After the operation the hand was put in a splint and kept bound up for 14 days. When the bandaging was removed the hand was found to be useless. It was not clear whether the fault lay with the surgeon or the doctors and nurses who had looked after him following the surgery. There were precedents for the view that doctors and consultants were not employees of the hospitals using their services. The following extracts are from the judgment of Denning LJ, delivered in the Court of Appeal, beginning at p 360:

Chapter

CASSIDY MINISTRY OF HEALTH [1951] 2 KB 343 The plaintiff entered hospital for an operation on his hand. After the operation the hand was put in a splint and kept bound up for 14 days. When the bandaging was removed the hand was found to be useless. It was not clear whether the fault lay with the surgeon or the doctors and nurses who had looked after him following the surgery. There were precedents for the view that doctors and consultants were not employees of the hospitals using their services. The following extracts are from the judgment of Denning LJ, delivered in the Court of Appeal, beginning at p 360:

ABSTRACT

It is no answer for them to say that their staff are professional men and women who do not tolerate any interference by their lay masters in the way they do their work. The doctor who treats a patient in the Walton Hospital can say equally with the ship’s captain who sails his ship from Liverpool and with the crane driver who works his crane in the docks, ‘I take no orders from anybody’. That ‘sturdy answer’, as Lord Simon described it, only means in each case that he is a skilled man who knows his work and will carry it out in his own way; but it does not mean that the authorities who employ him are not liable for his negligence. See Mersey Docks and Harbour Board v Coggins and Griffiths (Liverpool) Ltd (1947).19 The reason why the employers are liable in such cases is not because they can control the way in which the work is done – they often have not sufficient knowledge to do so – but because they employ the staff and have chosen them for the task and have in their hands the ultimate sanction for good conduct, the power of dismissal.