NHS payouts for medical negligence claims hit new annual high of £2.8bn

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The NHS paid out record sums in damages and legal costs for alleged mistakes and negligence by medical professionals last year.

In 2023/24, the cost of settling clinical negligence claims increased to £2.8bn from £2.7bn the previous year.

Half the costs were associated with poor maternity care, an annual report from the health service’s legal authority revealed.

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 overall value of NHS payouts.

The NHS Resolution found the number of new clinical negligence claims and reported incidents totalled 13,784.

The value associated with reported claims and an estimate of expected future claims in the past financial year for clinical negligence was £4.7 billion.

Some eight out of ten clinical claims were resolved without litigation, although the overall value of damages and legal costs continued to rise.

Only 50 cases went to a trial and 17 of those resulted in damages being awarded.

The report noted a 9 per cent increase in claims resulting from general practice, to 2,382, with £149m paid out in settlements, an increase of £9m on the previous year.

“Throughout all of this work our focus has been to deliver an efficient and effective service that provides the best possible value for public funds, and this has driven many of the programmes that sit below our last strategic priority, to invest in our people and our systems,” the report notes.

The report described collaboration “to improve maternity outcomes” as a strategic priority, following failings in the monitoring of babies during labour and after birth, and care for mothers.

“Each incident can lead to heartbreaking consequences for a family. Although secondary to the human impact, errors can also result in a significant financial cost to the NHS,” the report adds.

The NHS Resolution also found in claims valued at up to £25,000, the average legal costs were shown to have risen gradually over the past decade, from £19,776 to £26,095 in the past year.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson 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 make 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. In addition, we will train thousands more midwives and ensure that trusts failing on maternity care are robustly supported into rapid improvement, to help reduce instances of mistakes and harm.”