The National Audit Office (NAO) has said that the Government needs to take a “stronger and more integrated” approach if it is to rein in the increasing cost of clinical negligence claims across the health and justice systems.
Over the last ten years, spending on clinical negligence for NHS Trusts has quadrupled from £0.4 billion in 2006-07 to £1.6 billion in 2016-17, while the number of successful clinical negligence claims where damages were awarded has more than doubled, from 2,800 to 7,300. The figures have been laid out in a new report published by the NAO last week.
The NAO has also said that the cost of clinical negligence claims is rising at a faster rate year-on-year, than NHS funding. In addition, trusts spending a higher proportion of their income on clinical negligence are significantly more likely to be in deficit. In 2015-16, for example, the 14 trusts that spent 4% or more of their income on clinical negligence were in deficit.
Further calculations from the NAO have shown that the increasing number of claims accounted for 45% of the overall increase in costs, while rising payments for damages and claimant legal costs accounted for 33% and 21% respectively. The fastest percentage rise was in claimant legal costs, which has risen from £77 million to £487 million over the same time period. This is mainly due to an increase in both the number of low- and medium-value claims of less than £250,000 and their average cost. In 2016-17, the claimant’s legal costs exceeded the damages awarded in 61% of claims settled.
The NAO has said that the Department of Health and NHS Resolution’s proposed actions to contain the rising cost of clinical negligence claims are unlikely to stop this growth.
For example, NHS Resolution has reduced the average cost per claim of its claims operations. It also challenges excessive charges of claimants’ legal firms, and saved £144 million in 2015-16 by challenging claimants’ legal costs. A number of further schemes are proposed to contain the costs, however, even if successfully implemented, these will only save some £90 million a year by 2020-21. By contrast, the spending on clinical negligence for Trusts is expected to double to £3.2 billion by 2020-21.
Amyas Morse, head of the NAO, said that the government lacks a coherent cross-government strategy, underpinned by policy, to support measures to ta