After a sharp increase in the number of medical errors, the NHS has set aside £17.5 billion to cover the costs of paying compensation to thousands of people that are set to make clinical negligence claims.
A report compiled by MP’s revealed that there has been a surge of 11 per cent in just one year of the amount of significant mistakes being made by medical professionals. The news comes after Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced his plans to make it a criminal offence for any hospital to attempt to cover up any mistakes made its staff.
A vast majority of the clinical negligence expenses arises from birthing negligence, whereby NHS staff are making substantial errors during child birth, leading to lifelong conditions such as cerebral palsy. When a child is afflicted with this because of hospital treatment, they are required to pay the bill for the entirety of the child’s life to cover any additional costs of care; which can be hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. However, with the life expectancy of children with the illness increasing, with the help of modern medical science, the NHS are having to pay an increased amount of money for the care bill as a result.
This calculation of how much the NHS are expected to pay out, comes from a estimation based upon the number of claims that have already been filed, in addition to the number of claims the NHS are expecting to receive that haven’t been made yet.
Robert Oxley, campaign manager of the TaxPayers’ alliance commented on the report saying;
“This bill is a result of individual and collective failure within the health service and should not be tolerated. Keeping hospitals clean and safe through simple measures can save lives”.
Medical negligence is still very much an issue in the NHS that is negatively effecting thousands of people in the UK. It is happening more and more often and anyone that is effected by medical negligence has the right to claim compensation for the unnecessary suffering that it causes. Asons solicitors has a specialist team of medical negligence experts that are hand to give advice and talk to you have to pursue a medical negligence claim. For more information you can visit our website at www.asons.co.uk or phone our medical negligence phone line on 0844 850 1062.