NHS litigation claims double under coalition
Scale of clinical negligence claims is now unprecedented prompting claims that reorganisation has harmed patient care
Daniel Boffey, policy editor
The Observer, Saturday 13 December 2014 14.34 GMT
The number of litigation claims made against the NHS in a year has almost doubled under the coalition, prompting claims that the service is failing to deal with growing demands on its limited resources.
The scale of the clinical negligence claims is unprecedented, with 11,945 cases reported by NHS trusts over the last financial year compared with 6,562 in 2009-10.
Such are the costs of dealing with the legal actions that the NHS has increased the amount of money it retains to deal with claims, up from £8.7bn in the first year of the coalition government to £15.6bn in 2013-14 – adding to the financial stresses within the service.
The analysis, based on figures published annually by the NHS Litigation Authority, comes as NHS England revealed that 35,373 patients waited more than four hours for treatment in the first week of December. That number was 66% higher than the same period last year. Meanwhile 7,760 people were kept on a trolley for between four and 12 hours before a ward bed was found – up from 3,666.
Amid a barrage of criticism on Friday, Dame Barbara Hakin, the national director of commissioning operations for NHS England, was forced to admit in interviews that the NHS was “under a huge amount of pressure”. “We are seeing far more patients than we ever have before,” she said. The Department of Health has insisted that the NHS was well prepared for winter and that an injection of £700m would pay for extra nurses, doctors and beds this winter.
Labour said, however, that the figures on litigation should act as a warning.
The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, had previously admitted that a high number of litigation claims was a good indicator of poor care in the system. In a speech given at Birmingham Children’s Hospital in October, Hunt said standards in safety and quality of care must improve to reduce avoidable costs.
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http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/13/nhs-litigation-claims-double-under-coalition