The NHS paid out a record £2.87bn in damages and legal costs over alleged errors by medical professionals last year.
Half of that amount was related to claims for poor childbirth care, figures from the annual report by the body that defends legal claims against the health service show.
The NHS Resolution report showed that the “annual cost of harm” – the value of reported claims and an estimate of expected future claims arising from incidents in the last financial year – from clinical negligence was £4.7 billion.
The law firm said this was “money that could be spent on improvements to healthcare in the future.”
Their report, published last week, indicated that the total value of the damages and legal costs Overall, and particularly for the most seriously injured, compensation awards had been on an upward trend. However, he noted that there were “some welcome positive signs” and cited a reduction in damages inflation which had reduced the overall provision for clinical negligence.
Last year there was a 2.5 per cent rise in clinical negligence claims made against NHS trusts, to a total of 10,834.
And the report showed an increase of more than 9 percent in claims resulting from general practice, to 2,382.
Just over 80 percent of disputes were resolved without litigation, the report said, noting that this was the highest level ever and that only 50 cases went to trial. Of these, 17 resulted in damages, compared with 19 damages awarded in 60 trials the previous year.
• I served in Afghanistan, but being an NHS GP brought tears to my eyes.
“We recognize that this upward trend cannot continue indefinitely,” the report’s authors said, adding that the organization “will continue to promote dispute resolution over litigation.”
Given several recent scandals involving antenatal and postnatal care, including high-profile incidents at Nottingham University Hospitals and East Kent Hospitals, the report describes collaboration “to improve maternity outcomes” as a strategic priority.
The report noted that while allegations of negligence in obstetrics accounted for 13 per cent of clinical claims not involving general practice, they resulted in 57 per cent of the total value of NHS payments.
However, that number was down from 64 percent the previous year, a drop attributed to “early reporting” of birth injuries.
That scheme, the agency said, had “helped families access compensation for immediate needs more quickly.” This was crucial, the agency said, because “assessing the lifelong care needs of children who suffer serious harm in these cases will take longer than for other claims due to the need for developmental milestones to be reached before they can be assessed.”
• Hospitals have not been monitored for up to 10 years
The report also noted that plaintiffs’ lawyers’ costs for lower-value clinical negligence allegations had, for the first time, exceeded damages.
For claims valued at up to £25,000, average legal costs were shown to have risen gradually over the past decade, from £19,776 to £26,095 in the 12 months to last March.
It was 7 percent higher than the previous year’s figure and 32 percent higher than the 2014-15 period.
The Department of Health and Social Care said: “The NHS is broken and fixing it is our top priority. We recognise that significant improvements in patient safety are needed. That’s why on Friday we set out four immediate steps to get the Care Quality Commission fit for purpose.
“We will build on NHS Resolution’s three-year strategy, which focuses on prevention, learning and early intervention. We will also train thousands more midwives and ensure that facilities that are failing to deliver maternity care are given strong support to improve rapidly, to help reduce the occurrence of errors and harm.”
