There is currently no limit on legal costs claimed by lawyers in NHS cases of clinical negligence. These reimburse patients and families who’ve suffered from medical mistakes, but frankly too often lawyers have been the major beneficiaries. And the sums involved are huge: the Gloucestershire NHS alone paid out some £50 million over the last five years, and the whole of the NHS in 2017 spent £1.6 billion on clinical negligence. That was the result of some 40,000 clinical and administrative mistakes.
No wonder then that health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has focused relentlessly on improved Safety in our hospitals – primarily for the health of patients and also for the knock on impact to the financial health of the NHS.
In some cases lawyers have been found to collect fees up to 80 times more than the amount awarded to victims of minor claims. In one case, a lawyer claimed £83,000 in legal costs while the patient was awarded just £1,000. This has to be wrong.
So I’m glad that the government has proposed to work with professionals in the NHS and legal sector to come up with a cap for the costs that lawyers can recover in clinical negligence cases. This could save the NHS many millions of pounds every year, money that can be spent instead on helping to improve patient safety and outcomes. When things go wrong, lawyers have an important role to play, but that should not be at the expense of the NHS’s ability to use taxpayer funds to benefit patients.
