This article was written by Alberta pediatric malpractice lawyer Travis Bissett BSc, LLB, K.C. to support Canadian Patient Safet Week 2026, organized annually by Healthcare Excellence Canada
Every day, people trust their lives to professionals—whether it’s a taxi or truck driver behind the wheel or a health care provider guiding a family through childbirth. Both roles carry immense responsibility, and both are insured because even the most careful, well-trained person can make a mistake that causes harm. This article, grounded in the review of current Canadian standards of care and a review of hundreds of cases, uses the analogy of driving to explain how health care professionals’ errors—like a driver’s—can lead to lifelong, compensable harm, especially for newborn babies and their families.
The Road of Labour and Delivery: A Shared Journey
Imagine the road to delivery as a busy highway. The health care professional is the driver, responsible for safely navigating the journey. The patient and their baby are precious innocent passengers. Along the way, there are signs, signals, and hazards—some obvious, some subtle. The professional’s job is to watch for these, respond appropriately, and keep everyone safe.
Insurable Mistakes: What Are They?
Just as car insurance exists because even good drivers can make mistakes, professional liability insurance covers health care providers for errors that cause harm. You do not have to prove bad intent, just an error by a healthcare professional that made it worse. Sometimes, despite best efforts, a driver misses a stop sign, or a health care provider misses a change in a baby’s heart rate indicating natural birth should stop and a c-section should be made immediately. When these kinds of mistakes cause injury, Canadian law recognizes the right to compensation for the victim.
The Victim’s Perspective: Lifelong Impact
When a driver’s mistake causes a crash, the victim may suffer injuries that change their life forever. In childbirth, a missed sign or delayed response can result in birth asphyxia—where the baby’s brain and organs are deprived of oxygen. This can lead to conditions like cerebral palsy, developmental delays, or multi-organ injury. These injuries are often permanent, affecting the child, their family, and community for a lifetime.
Why Do These Mistakes Occur?
- Distraction and Overload: Just as a driver can stop paying attention or fail to receive an important communication signal or sign, health care teams stop paying attention or fail to receive an important communication signal or sign.
- Communication Breakdowns: Poor communication is a leading cause of preventable harm for both driver error and medical error. This issue increases when you have more than one person “driving the bus”. If a team member doesn’t clearly share a concern or fails to share key information in a timely manner, critical decisions can be lost. A delay in communicating signs of important fetal distress is as helpful as pointing out the moose on the road after the collision.
- Loss of Situational Awareness: Like a driver who must track their surroundings, health care professionals must constantly reassess the clinical picture and anticipate what might happen next.
Preventing Harm: Lessons from the Road
Both drivers and health care professionals can reduce mistakes by:
- Following Rules and Protocols: We use guidelines, like the Fetal Health Surveillance standards, to ensure nothing is missed.
- Clear Communication: Using agreed-upon language and confirming understanding, especially during handovers, briefings, or emergencies.
- Ongoing Education: Regular training and updates, as recommended in the guideline, help maintain skills and awareness.
- Staying Alert: Taking breaks, managing workload, and minimizing distractions.
Compassion and Accountability
It’s important to remember that when mistakes happen on the road or in a health care setting, the patient and the baby are not claiming against the health care professional personally. Just as all drivers are required to pay for insurance, all health care professionals are required to pay insurance. For example, doctors currently sit on a 5.8-billion-dollar fund which is invested and designed to cover the lifelong impact of medical errors. Hospitals, nurses, and midwives have similar funds to cover mistakes that cause negative outcomes. Just as drivers are responsible for the harm they cause, health care professionals and systems must acknowledge errors, learn from them, and support those affected. All drivers are expected to honestly report accidents even if it is 2:00 a.m. and they hit a pedestrian dressed in black on a dark road. The writer questions why we don’t require health care professionals to do the same, especially since mistakes in health care are often hard to discover for an average Canadian family who understands driving mistakes but may not understand health care mistakes.
A Victim-Focused Approach
For families whose babies are harmed by a missed sign or delayed response, the impact is profound. They deserve compassion, honesty, and support—not just from the individual provider, but from the entire health care system. During the claim process there is an ongoing importance of respectful communication, open and clear documentation including audit trails, and a commitment to learning from every incident.
Conclusion: Navigating Together
The journey to a safe labour delivery is filled with potential hazards, just like any road trip. By understanding the parallels between driving and health care, we can foster a culture of vigilance, compassion, and continuous improvement in the Canadian Health System. When everyone—patients, families, and professionals—works together, we can make the road to delivery safer for every new life.
About the author: Travis Bissett and his team have focused on personal injury including medical malpractice for the past 19 years, serving clients from any of the16 of Stringam Law’s offices in Alberta. In an effort to give his clients the best service, Travis serves as chair of the Personal Injury Section of the Canadian Bar Association in Alberta, as a member of the birth injury practice group of the American Association for Justice, and vice-chair of the Alberta Civil Trial Lawyers Association where annually organizes and participates in multiple malpractice and personal injury seminars across North America. The views of this article remain those of the writer and he can be reached for a free consultation at tbissett@stringam.ca.