NHS bungles earn lawyers £13 a second
THE NHS handed law firms the equivalent of £13 a second last year to cover fees racked up pursuing claims for medical blunders.
The £411 million bill – an average of £1.1 million a day – would pay for 17,000 new nurses or 24,000 kidney transplants. Legal fees sometimes outstrip the damages paid to patients.
NHS Resolution, which handles legal claims, says medical negligence specialists Irwin
Mitchell received £50 million in claimant costs, while rivals Slater and Gordon collected £20 million and Fletchers £13 million. The ten highestearning firms were paid £139 million to cover fees while winning damages of £509 million. The Department of Health has vowed to try to reduce the mammoth bill.
Dr Matthew Lee of the Medical Defence Union, which offers indemnity to doctors facing negligence claims, highlighted one case in which a patient won £1,000 compensation but lawyers sought £31,000 in costs, settling for £19,000.
He said: ‘The money spent on legal costs for clinical negligence cases is concerning.’ Legal costs for 2018/19 have come down from the record high of £425 million in the previous year, but the amount of damages awarded rose by
£238 million to £1.3 billion.
The NHS spent a further £126 million on its own legal costs, up from £115 million the previous year.
Lisa Jordan, head of medical negligence at
Irwin Mitchell, said: ‘The compensation these patients receive is not a lottery win.
‘It pays for vital rehabilitation and support to help them get their lives back on track.
‘They would much rather the negligence had never happened at all.’