The Vancouver Sun
February 3, 2001 Saturday FINAL EDITION
HEADLINE: Patient who refused blood has right to sue: Court rules man can sue the hospital where his Jehovah's Witness
wife died
BYLINE: Neal Hall
A Jehovah's Witness who signed a release form refusing any blood transfusions before she died during a routine operation
did not sign away her right to sue for medical negligence, a B.C. Supreme Court judge ruled Friday.
Daphne Hobbs underwent a hysterectomy at Chilliwack General Hospital on April 15, 1996. The operation was expected to
take up to two hours and result in the loss of about 200 millilitres of blood.
Instead, there was unexpected and substantial bleeding during the operation. The 36-year-old
mother of three died at 1 a.m.the next day after losing all her circulating blood, about 4,000 ml. Her husband, Ernest Hobbs, filed a lawsuit in 1998, claiming
negligence against the hospital and a number of doctors. A number of defendants were struck from the case, which is
proceedings against Dr. John Robertson, the obstetrician who performed the operation, and Dr. A.A. Suleman, the anesthetist.
Ernest Hobbs filed the lawsuit on behalf of his children Kaleb, 6, Travis, 10 and Jada, 12.
A trial was set for last Dec. 4 but a legal issue that had to be sorted out first was whether the release form, specifying that
Daphne Hobbs refused to accept blood or blood products for religious reasons, absolved the doctors of liability.
Justice Allen Melvin, in a 21-page written judgment, decided it did not. "In my opinion, the form she signed does not ...
amount to a voluntary assumption of risk of surgeons' negligence by Mrs. Hobbs," the judge concluded.
"A contrary conclusion could result in patients (who do not sign releases) receiving a higher standard of care than those who
do so."
As a result of the decision, the matter will now proceed to trial or possibly an out-of-court settlement, said lawyer Lou Zivot,
who is acting for Ernest Hobbs, 46.
"With this hurdle out of the way, I would hope we could proceed to talking about settlement," Zivot said.
"This is quite a novel point," he said of the legal issue.
According to court documents, the doctors deny their care of the patient was negligent. Robertson's statement of defence says
he "exercised reasonable care, skill and diligence."
Robertson concluded the death "could have been prevented if this lady could have received blood and coagulation products."
An affidavit filed by Ernest Hobbs states he was called to the hospital and was advised there had been some bleeding.
"It was sometime after my arrival that I was asked ... about giving Daphne blood and I told him I
would not go against her
wishes or religious convictions," the affidavit says.
"Nobody told me that even if blood had been given at that time, whether it would make a difference. I was simply told that it
was unlikely she would survive."
An affidavit by Dr. Mark Hobbs, a Montreal obstetrician and gynecologist retained by Hobbs's lawyer, said Robertson's
operative report on the surgery was inadequate because "it does not detail all the events that must have occurred during this
four-hour operation."
Boyd, who noted he had treated numerous Jehovah's Witness patients, wrote that it appeared Daphne Hobbs had been given
massive amounts of crystalloids that had "washed out" all the clotting factors in her blood so it could not coagulate.
Boyd said Hobbs suffered a pelvic hemorrhage, which is hard to see during vaginal surgery. He suggested Robertson "should
have opened the abdomen and controlled the bleeding" rather than continuing the operation vaginally.
Robertson's operation report stated "the site of the bleeding could not be easily ascertained."
Daphne Hobbs had sought the operation to solve a bleeding problem. She told her husband it was low risk. Previously, she
had attended hospital for four medical procedures, including a cesarean section, and each time had signed a release form
refusing to permit blood transfusions.
The operation record shows the surgery commenced at 12:18 p.m. and finished at 4:35 p.m.
Initially, there was one intravenous line connected to Hobbs but a second line was connected at 1:45, when she was given 10
per cent dextran, a blood substitute.