New Brunswick Birth Injury Lawyers

Deliveries in New Brunswick happen in Horizon and Vitalité hospitals, and the record they generate, the fetal monitoring strips, the labour chart, the cord gases and the newborn resuscitation notes, decides whether a family has a claim. A New Brunswick birth injury lawyer obtains that record whole and puts it to obstetric and neonatal experts. The question is never whether the birth was hard. It is whether the team responded to what the monitoring showed, in the time the standard of care allowed.

What the Labour Record Shows Decides the Case

Fetal heart monitoring exists to show distress in time to act. The recurring patterns in these claims are distress visible on the strips without escalation, a decision to operate made and then executed too slowly, traction applied to a stuck shoulder beyond what the manoeuvres permit, and a newborn resuscitation that was delayed relative to its own protocol. Each is answered from the record, timed to the minute. That is why the strips and charts are requested before anything else, from the hospital and in both official languages where the care was delivered in French.

Cerebral Palsy, Erb’s Palsy and HIE Have Natural Causes Too, So Causation Is Fought

The defence in nearly every birth injury case is that the harm began before labour. Cord gases, placental pathology and imaging of the child’s brain are the battleground. Neuroradiology and placental pathology experts join the obstetric ones, because a claim only succeeds if the injury happened during a window when proper care would have prevented it. Where our experts conclude the injury was not preventable, the family is told exactly that, at no cost.

A Child’s Claim Waits, and the Family Should Not

Under the Limitation of Actions Act, SNB 2009, c L-8.5, the ordinary period is two years from discovery, and a child’s own claim is generally postponed while the child is a minor. The parents’ claims for their own losses do not wait the same way. Neither does the evidence: strips get archived, staff move on, memories thin. The investigation should start when the questions do, usually in the first year of the child’s life.

What a New Brunswick Birth Injury Lawyer Claims for the Child

The damages case is built from the child’s needs: therapy, attendant care, equipment, home modification, educational support and the income the child may never earn, costed by care experts and economists over a lifetime. The parents’ own care of the child has a value the claim includes. The heads of damage follow the general law described at medical malpractice lawyers, scaled to a lifetime.

The Action Runs in the Court of King’s Bench Against Separate Defendants

The claim proceeds in the Court of King’s Bench of New Brunswick, Trial Division. Obstetricians and family physicians are defended by the Canadian Medical Protective Association. Nurses and the hospital answer through Horizon or Vitalité. Both are usually named. These cases take years and are defended by experienced counsel, which is one reason the pleading follows the expert opinions rather than preceding them.

What the First Meeting Needs From the Family

Bring what you have: the discharge summaries, any records already released to you, the child’s diagnoses and therapy reports, and your own timeline of the labour, written down while memory is fresh. Nothing needs to be complete or organised. The firm requests the full charts itself, and gaps in a family’s copy of events are normal. What only you hold is the account of what was said in the room, and that is worth writing down this week.

A Slow Transfer and an Unexplained Diagnosis Both Warrant Review

Our child’s delivery was at a small hospital and the transfer took hours. Where a delivery needed a level of care the hospital could not give, the decisions to transfer, and when, are part of the standard of care. The claim examines the system around the delivery room, not only the room.

Nobody has told us why our child has cerebral palsy. You are entitled to the complete maternal and newborn records. An expert review of them is the only reliable answer, and the first review costs the family nothing.

No Fee Unless the Claim Resolves

The firm carries the records and expert costs through the life of the claim. The Moncton office serves families in English and French, anywhere in the province. Contact the firm and the records requests go out first. For claims outside birth injury, see injury law areas.