Cause of death decision upheld

Press, 19 December 1988, Page 3

Cause of death decision upheld

PA Wellington The Accident Compensation Corporation has been criticised for causing distress to a bereaved couple by giving them incorrect information about their daughter’s death.

Mr Brian Blackwood, for the Accident Compensation Appeal Authority, upheld a corporation decision that the death of Mr I. T. Glover’s daughter, Janice Williams, was not caused by personal injury suffered by accident.

But he expressed concern that incorrect information had been given to the parents by a corporation officer, Russell McLeary. Mr Glover’s daughter died at Dunedin Hospital in March, 1986, aged 37, the cause of her death being certified as brain death, cardiac arrest, and respiratory obstruction

due to epileptic seizure. Mrs Williams had been found in her room at the hostel where she lived, face down on her bed. She was taken to Dunedin Hospital where she was certified as being dead three days later.

A claim was subsequently lodged on the basis that death was by accident through suffocation.

This was turned down, Mr Glover being told by Mr McLeary that death had been caused by his daughter swallowing her tongue during an epileptic seizure, and accordingly was not a personal injury suffered oy accident. In his decision, Mr Blackwood said there was absolutely no justification from the evidence then on the file for the corporation to conclude that the death of Mrs Williams had been caused by the swallowing of her tongue.