An hour to save a life, many years to rebuild it

The worst few hours of his life, Vincent’s client Dusan recently featured on the BBC programme “An hour to save your life”. A Czech fitness trainer living in London, Dusan was hit by his bus on the way to the gym and suffered serious head and internal injuries. The cameras followed the 37-year-old from the moment doctors arrived on the scene and carried out an intricate procedure at the road-side, to his arrival at A&E, various scans and eventually surgery to deal with internal bleeding. The efforts of the medical professionals were nothing short of heroic - and were ultimately successful - saving Dusan’s life in those critical first few hours after the trauma.

The incredible care he received in that “Golden Hour” was crucial and after the cameras left he remained in intensive care for six weeks and is now recovering at home with his partner. He approached Vincents and asked our Personal Injury team to represent him in his fight for compensation. Although based in London, he chose Vincents because of our multi-lingual team which includes a Czech speaker and makes communication so much easier at such a difficult time.
He sustained a degree of brain damage which is likely to affect Dusan for the rest of his life and, while he concentrates on the physical recovery and putting his life back together, our job is to gather the evidence and secure a settlement that will give Dusan and his family the chance to move on without worrying about the costs, to secure as much help as they need.

Following an initial fact-finding discussion with Dusan and his partner, and our team has been collating the relevant police and medical records, and securing copies of any CCTV or video footage that captured the incident and the aftermath and may help the claim. Throughout this process, we remain extremely mindful of the fact that a client’s life has been turned upside down and their priority is in getting better.

This case is far from its conclusion, as we are still awaiting the long-term prognosis from Dusan’s medical team, and could take many years to be resolved. The value of that settlement cannot be estimated at this stage but the funds will go some way to helping Dusan start to rebuild his life. The very fact that he even has the chance to do that is thanks to the immense skill and dedication of the doctors and nurses whose heroics we saw first-hand in the BBC documentary.

Olivia Robinson, Personal Injury Department