NHS negligence claims rise by 20 per cent in just one year

Official figures show the number of cases registered has increased by almost 20 per cent in just one year - and by 80 per cent since 2008.

Latest forecasts suggest the bill for negligence will soon reach £19 million - almost one fifth of the total NHS budget.

In total 16,006 patients or bereaved relatives lodged claims against the health service during 2012/13, compared with 13,517 the previous year, a rise of 18.4 per cent.

Experts said the figures reflect a lack of tolerance for poor care, and patients feeling forced to take legal action because hospitals refused to apologise or explain their failings.

Last night Margaret Hodge, chairman of the Commons public accounts committee said the new figures were “deeply worrying”.

She said: “The trend is really concerning. Some of this is about ambulance-chasing lawyers, but more than that I think this reflects problems with the quality of healthcare, and that is a major concern.”

More than £1bn was spent on settlements last year, but around one quarter of costs are spent on legal fees, mainly to claimants’ lawyers under a “no-win, no fee” system which means legal firms can charge up to £900 an hour for their services if claims are successful.

Katherine Murphy, chief executive of the Patients Association, said: “I think the public has become far less tolerant about putting up with appalling failings in care, but most people only pursue legal action when every other avenue has failed.

"Most people who contact us say that all they wanted was an explanation of what went wrong, and changes made so that nobody else would suffer.”

Figures show that in 2011/12, five law firms received £35 million from legal action against the NHS.

They included Irwin Mitchell, paid £18.9 million from working on 522 cases, gaining a total of £43 million for clients, and Leigh Day & Co which made £5.5 million from 197 cases.

The firms said they had taken on major cases. Irwin Mitchell said it had won an £8 million payout for the family of a brain injury victim, and that the NHS needed to reduce its bill by stopping repeating the same errors, and by admitting to mistakes earlier.

In December, Worcestershire Acute NHS Hospital trust wrote to 38 families after appalling failings, including the case of a patient starved to death and dying people left to scream in pain. The hospital paid out £410,000 to families reperesented by Leigh Day & Co.

Laywers said they expected to see an “explosion” in medical negligence claims in future years, following the report of a public inquiry by Robert Francis QC in February into failings at Mid Staffordshire Hospital Foundation trust, where up to 1,200 more patients died than would have been expected.

Ian Pryer, senior partner at medical negligence solicitors Axiclaim said: “In the past, victims of medical accidents often had moral reservations about claiming against the NHS, despite having clearly suffered extreme negligence in some cases but the shocking findings of the Francis report have now made hospitals fair game in the eyes of the public.”

A Department of Health spokesman said: “Whilst we know the vast majority of patients get good, safe care, the best way to reduce compensation claims is to improve patient safety further - and this is a priority.”

He said the NHS had brought in a global expert, Dr Don Berwick, to provide advice on how to create “a zero-harm culture in the NHS.”

This article is courtesy of The Telegraph.