NHS pays out £1m to patient it’s harmed almost EVERY DAY
BIG compensation payouts awarded against the NHS have become so frequent that it is handing over million-pound settlements on a near daily basis, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
According to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act, there were 336 seven-figure payouts to patients seriously harmed by medical errors last year.
And the number of £1 millionplus settlements has risen by 30 per cent in the past two years – up from 257 in 2015-16, according to NHS Resolution, the health service’s litigation authority.
Of the 869 cases between 2015 and 2018, almost half involved children aged nought to nine.
Botched births, such as midwives failing to spot signs of distress in t he baby during labour leading to oxygen starvation and subsequent brain damage, are the most common reason for the seven-figure payments because of the need to care for the child for their whole life. In October last year, Cardiff and Vale University health board in Wales agreed to pay a record £19.8 million in damages for failings in the care of a woman who suffered catastrophic brain injuries when she was deprived of oxygen as a baby in early 2000.
The woman is seriously disabled as a result of not being given oxygen for half an hour when she was being treated for reflux.
Separate figures from NHS Resolution show it expects to pay out a staggering £7.8 billion in clinical negligence costs – including both damages and legal fees – over the next three years.
The sum is expected to rise from £2.43 billion this financial year – more than the budget for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – to £2.83 billion in 2021-22. It means that clinical negligence costs will consume about £1 in every £3 of the extra funds that the NHS is set to receive annually under plans to raise England’s NHS yearly budget by £20.5 billion by 2023/24.
Last night, Peter Walsh, of the campaign group Action Against Medical Accidents, said: ‘These figures are eye- watering but they do not tell the full story of the human pain caused by negligent treatment in the NHS.’
In a reference to a proposed ‘fixed costs’ scheme to impose limits on what lawyers can charge in cases where damages are less than £25,000, Mr Walsh said there were‘ worrying signs’ that the Government was ‘seeking to limit access to justice’ for those harmed by NHS errors.
However, with legal fees alone costing the NHS almost £600 million last year, Ministers are understood to favour the cap.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: ‘We are committed to tackling the rising cost of clinical negligence so more of our funding can be spent on frontline patient care.’