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BC Injury Claims and Production of Pre Accident Medical Records

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Further to my previous post discussing this topic reasons for judgement were released today dealing with the extent of pre-accident record disclosure ICBC (or other defendants) are entitled to when a Plaintiff sues for damages for personal injuries in the BC Supreme Court.
In today’s case (Moukhine v. Collins) the Plaintiff was involved in a 2007 BC car crash.  The Plaintiff sued for damages.  In the Statement of Defence the lawyer plead that the injuries are not the result of an accident, but are were in fact pre-existing conditions.  (This is a rather ‘boilerplate’ pleading raised by the defence in almost every ICBC injury claim).  The defence lawyer then asked that the Plaintiff provide medical records which pre-date the accident by as much as 15 years.
The Court was asked to decide  “whether a mere allegation in a pleading that a plaintiff’s injuries are not the result of an accident, but are caused by his or her pre-accident health condition is enough, without more, to entitle a defendant to production of pre-accident medical records“.
Mr. Justice Harris went on to hold that in personal injury cases, the mere allegation by the Defence lawyer of a pre-existing condition may be enough to compel the disclosure of pre-accident records.  Specifically the Court reasoned as follows:

[18] In my opinion, nothing in Dufault is authority for the proposition that pleadings alone are insufficient to make an order under Rule 26(11) or that evidence is always necessary. Similarly, Dhaliwal does not address the relevance of pleadings as a basis for making a Rule 26(11) order. There is no reference in the judgment  to the issues pleaded in the action and whether pleadings  would have affected the outcome. The case deals only with the sufficiency of the evidence that was before the court. I do not draw from the case the proposition that pleadings standing alone and defining the issues in the action are never a sufficient basis to satisfy the court to make a Rule 26(11) order.

[19] In Marsh v. Parker, 2000 BCSC 1605 at para. 9, Master Horn concluded that Dhaliwal stood for the proposition that “there must be something either by way of evidence or by way of the pleadings which raises the plaintiff’s pre-injury state of health as an issue.”  I agree. Indeed, in Creed v. Dorio, [1998] B.C.J. No. 2479, Mr. Justice Edwards, at paragraph 13, rejected the proposition that “some evidence”  was necessary to establish relevance….

[22] In an appropriate case pleadings  are a sufficient basis on which to exercise a discretion to order production of at least some documents. In some cases it is reasonably obvious that records  may contain relevant (in the sense that term is used in Peruvian Guano) information and should be produced, subject to production following a Jones orHalliday format. Evidence may be required in order to resist a production order. That does not mean, however, that an order will always go on the basis of pleadings alone and it may be premature in some circumstances  to make such an order before discovery (see, for example, Mehdipour v. Shingler (18 March 2009), Vancouver M080517 (S.C.)). Merely pleading pre-existing conditions does not deprive the court of its discretion to refuse to make the order sought when, for example, there is no air of reality about the alleged connection between the documents sought and the issues in the action. Evidence may therefore, on occasion,  be required to establish the relevant connection to overcome the conclusion that the documents are  irrelevant to the claim.

I should point out that as of July, 2010 the new BC Supreme Court Civil Rules come into force and the tests for what types of documents need to be exchanged will be narrower so it will be interesting to see how this area of law changes under the soon to be in place new system.

bc injury claims, disclosure, discovery, icbc injury claims, Moukhine v. Collins, Mr. Justice Harris, Production of Documents, production of pre accident records

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