Bailey v Ministry of Defence
English tort law case on factual causation
Bailey v Ministry of Defence [2008] EWCA Civ 883 is an English tort law case. It concerns the problematic question of factual causation, and the interplay of the "but for" test and its relaxation through a "material contribution" test.
Facts
Miss Grannia Geraldine Bailey went on a holiday to Kenya with her fiance in late September 2000. She came back with what was suspected to be gallstones. In early January 2001 she was admitted to Royal Hospital Haslar (a hospital for civilian NHS patients, but also used and run by the Ministry of Defence). At the hospital there were complications during the ERCP procedure to remove the stones from her bile duct. She bled extensively, but was put in a ward with little supervision. She was not resuscitated properly during the night, and she was very unwell in the morning. She got worse. At the same time (but this was not related to the hospital's lack of care) Miss Bailey developed pancreatitis.
“Bailey v Ministry of Defence” enters the record as english tort law case on factual causation. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bailey, Ministry and Defence can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Bailey v Ministry of Defence” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Bailey, Ministry and Defence provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4848405. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2000 and 2001.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bailey v Ministry of Defence” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.