OUR HOSPITALS PAY OUT £17m IN NEGLIGENCE CLAIMS

THE NHS in Coventry and Warwickshire paid out nearly £17million in negligence claims last year.

Figures from NHS Resolution, which handles claims on behalf of NHS trusts, show that the NHS had to pay £16.9m in negligence claims in the area in the financial year 2017/18.

The total is made up of £9.2m in actual damages, £1.8m in defence costs and £5.8m in claimant costs.

It is up from £15.3m in 2016/17.

Amounts paid out in Coventry and Warwickshire University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust alone paid £10.7m in 2017/18 - the biggest amount for a single hospital trust in the area.

Nuneaton’s George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust had the second highest amount paid out at £3.4m.

South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust paid out £2.8m - the third highest amount in Coventry and Warwickshire.

There are four clinical negligence schemes that cover defence and claimant legal costs as well as damages.

One, the Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts (CNST), is for incidents that occurred after April 1995.

Another, the Existing Liabilities Scheme (ELS), is for those that occurred before that period.

The third covers claims against former Regional Health Authorities abolished in 1996 and the last covers clinical negligence liabilities transferred to the Department of Health following the abolition of health bodies.

Because figures from NHS Resolution only include CNST and ELS, it means that the total amount paid under all four schemes could be even higher.

Of the £16.9m, £66,998 was paid by the South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust for clinical claims against NHS organisations where the incident took place before April 1, 1995.

Nationally, total payments relating to NHS clinical schemes increased by £520.4 million (30 per cent) from £1.7bn to £2.2bn.

This is despite the number of new clinical negligence claims falling slightly from 10,686 received in 2016/17 to 10,673 in 2017/18.

NHS Resolution said the cost increase was partly due to pay-outs for claims that were made in previous years.

However, £404 million of the additional expenditure nationally was because of a change in the Personal Injury Discount Rate (PIDR) on March 20, 2017.

The PIDR is a way to calculate the appropriate amount of compensation to claimants who have suffered life-changing injuries.

The PIDR was changed by the government in such a way that the cost of large personal injury claims, with an element of future loss of earnings, have gone up significantly.

This change has been branded ‘foolish’ by experts.

Niall Dickson, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents health service organisations across the healthcare sector, said: “It is right and fair that there must be reasonable compensation for patients harmed through clinical negligence and we need to do everything we can to eliminate these mistakes.

“But the justifiable case for compensation has to be balanced against society’s ability to pay and the fact that we have a free at the point of use health care system.

“Money that is used for this purpose cannot be used for frontline care. At a time when NHS finances are already under enormous strain, this just makes things worse.

“Unless we deal with this, a sizeable chunk of the new money being promised will be swallowed up by these claims rather than used for much-needed investment to help the mass of patients. Part of this [the increasing amount spent] is down to a foolish change in the way compensation is calculated, which will hopefully be addressed by Parliament, but this still paints a hugely troubling picture.”

A spokesperson for the University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust told the Telegraph that 206 claim payments were made in 2017/18, and clarified that claims made against the trust are in line or below other hospital trusts of their size.

The spokesperson said: “More than 800,000 people receive excellent treatment at our hospitals each year, but in the small number of cases where our high standards are not met, we take these incidents extremely seriously.

“In cases where errors are highlighted, whether or not claims are made, we work hard to ensure lessons are learned from these incidents to ensure that the patient experience continuously improves.”

They added that claims are handled on a rolling basis and are often resolved years after they are first made.

The Telegraph has also contacted the George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust and the South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust for a comment.