Widow wins appeal in cancer misdiagnosis case against lab

The Court of Appeal has ordered the High Court to redetermine an award of more than $1.2 million to a 53-year-old widow who sued a medical lab and its medical director for failing to detect cancer in her husband's skin sample.

The five-judge court allowed Ms Carol Ann Armstrong's appeal that the medical negligence caused her husband, Mr Peter Traynor, to lose his full life expectancy instead of the four years held in the judgment of the High Court last year.

The Court of Appeal affirmed the High Court's finding that Quest Laboratories and its director, Dr Tan Hong Wui, had failed to spot the skin cancer in a skin sample from Mr Traynor in 2009.

Mr Traynor, a Singapore-based information technology specialist, died in 2013 at the age of 49.

The Canadian couple have two daughters, aged 10 and 12.

Judge of Appeal Andrew Phang, in decision grounds yesterday, said: "It is difficult to understate the significance of the respondents' breach... Lives depend upon accurate diagnoses by pathologists, and diagnoses had therefore to be undertaken with due diligence."

Justice Phang wrote on the court's behalf: "In the present case, Dr Tan not only failed to state that he could not rule out melanoma, he also delivered a report indicating the exact opposite - that there was no malignancy. Put simply, Dr Tan intended to convey, and did convey, that the lesion was benign."

Both parties' appeals on the calculation of damages were partially allowed and the case is to be remitted to the High Court to revise the sum payable based on the parameters provided by the Court of Appeal.

The High Court last year found that the respondents had breached their duty of care but had then also rejected Ms Armstrong's claim that her husband could have been cured, awarding damages based on four years of life expectancy for him instead.

The judge awarded the widow $1,241,334 for dependency and loss of inheritance.

Ms Armstrong appealed to the apex court and the defendants also cross-appealed.

Her lawyers, led by Mr Edmund Kronenburg and Mr Christopher Goh, argued that the damages should have been awarded based on Mr Traynor's full life expectancy of up to the age of 82.

The respondents' team of lawyers, led by Senior Counsel Kuah Boon Theng and lawyer Eric Tin, submitted that the High Court erred in finding their clients liable for breach of duty.

Among other things, they urged the court to reduce the damages payable in relation to Mr Traynor's estimated income.

The court rejected their defence that the cancer had migrated from Mr Traynor's lymph nodes to his distant organs before they had misdiagnosed him in 2009.

It also found that the sole cause of death was the cancer that spread from the nodes after 2009.

The appeal court revised the High Court's finding of Mr Traynor's annual income from $450,000 to $308,386, but affirmed the majority of the judge's assessments on the pre-trial dependency and the loss of inheritance claims.

It also allowed Ms Armstrong's appeal in relation to the post-trial loss of inheritance claim.

"Accordingly, we remit these issues to the judge for him to reach the appropriate sum for the post-trial loss of inheritance," said the appeal court.

The appeal court urged all parties to look into settling the damages issue in the interests of "effecting closure as well as the saving of costs".

Quest Lab and Dr Tan were ordered to pay $75,000 to Ms Armstrong for the cost of the appeal.