Partner Notification

BT v. Oei [1999] New South Wales Supreme Court 1082:

The latest judgment in the series that has crystallised the question of partner notification. A patient went to a doctor who although he counselled him on safer sex and gave him information material on hepatitis, failed to advise an HIV test although he showed all the signs of HIV infection. He later tested positive and disclosed the fact to his wife, but it was too late and she had already been infected. They sued the doctor for negligence. The court found that to establish negligence the plaintiff has to prove that there was a direct nexus between the doer and the act of negligence and that this was the main cause of the resultant harm. In the event both parties accepted that the doctors owed the patient a duty to care. As the evidence proved that the infection of the wife was from the husband, the legal issue that remained was if this duty extended to the sexual partner of the patient. The court found that doctors have a public duty, and that they have the legal responsibility of the community at large, which supersedes even doctor-patient confidentiality. The court found that in the event the doctor did not have a duty to warn the partner of the patient, but to inform the patient of the risks of transmission so that he could take preventive measures. In that light there was a duty of care to the patient's sexual partner. The doctors had failed to do this duty. The court held against the doctors.