NHS pays out record £93million to families of patients who died due to botched care

PAYMENTS from the NHS to families of patients who died due to botched care have more than doubled in seven years.

A record 1,101 successful fatality claims against the NHS were settled for £93,349,775 in the 12 months to April.

It is a 107 per cent increase from 738 settlements worth £45.1m in 2015/16.

But the true cost to the taxpayer was even higher as the NHS paid £14.4m of legal fees and £58.9m for claimant’s lawyer costs, meaning the total spent on the payouts was £166.6million.

Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust ranked top of the pile for care claim flops – stumping up £10.5m of damages in a year for 131 deaths.

Other trusts to hit three figures included Mid and South Essex, University Hospitals Birmingham and United Lincolnshire Hospitals, which all paid out at least £9.5m each.

NHS Resolution statistics obtained by The Sun on Sunday show a string of vital errors that led to the untimely deaths.

They include 21 fatalities caused by a delay in performing operations, 18 failures to correctly interpret x-rays and 11 cases where bungling docs forgot to get informed consent before surgical procedures.

A further 23 deaths were linked to failures to follow up on abnormal test results while 28 were down to medication errors.

And 37 payouts worth an average of £97,700 were handed to the families of people who died after being given the wrong treatment.

Another 37 were linked to GPs and ambulance staff failing to refer patients to specialists soon enough for life-saving treatment, while 34 fatalities were caused by medics discharging patients from hospital beds too early.

The highest single payout was between £1m and £1.5m while the average handed to a bereaved family was £84,786.

It comes as new figures show NHS staff took 6.1million days off last year due to stress, anxiety and depression – a quarter more than before the Covid-19 pandemic in 2019.

And junior doctors are set to trigger nine days of Christmas havoc by walking out on Wednesday as a months-long pay row blocks efforts to cut waiting lists from 7.7 million.

Paul Whiteing, chief executive of the patients’ group Action Against Medical Accidents, said a shortage of nurses and doctors as well as record-high waiting lists could be behind the surge in payouts.

He told told The Sun on Sunday: “Where you’ve got staff who are under such pressure, inevitably patient safety issues are not going to be the top priority when clinicians are thinking about getting through all the patients that they have got waiting.

“It is a great tragedy. There’s no one easy answer and I wish there were.

“Undoubtedly, if we can get the workforce in a good place and get the NHS backlog down a bit it will give more space for clinicians to be thinking more about patient safety.

“To some degree, it may get a bit worse before it’s going to get better.”

Payments are generally higher depending on the age of the patient and whether they were fit and healthy, or had a long working life ahead of them.

Most claims are resolved without the need for formal court proceedings by in-house NHS managers.

The total amount of payouts is still lower than the figure in the 12 months to April 2022, when an all-time high £114m was awarded across 1,095 successful death claims worth as much as £3million each.

An NHS Resolution spokesman said: “Each claim represents an episode of harm with associated financial cost to the NHS together with an immeasurable impact on patients, their families and the healthcare staff involved.

“NHS Resolution is committed to sharing learning from harm to help the NHS improve patient safety.”

A Department for Health and Social Care spokesman added: “Patient safety is paramount and we have taken significant steps to improve the safety of care.

“We have delivered the first NHS Patient Safety Strategy and appointed the first Patient Safety Commissioner to make patients’ voices heard throughout the health system.

“There is no evidence to suggest clinical negligence costs have risen across the past five years. due to a decline in safety or staffing shortages.”