Tuesday 30 June 2009

Well there's your answer, or at least part of it...

MacHeath left a comment here as follows:

Which brings me neatly to another point - do we know how much is being paid out in compensation for these [NHS] mistakes, to say nothing of the expensive long-term care needed when cancer has gone untreated for years?

From the BBC today:

The rising cost of litigation means the NHS has had to put aside a record £787m this year to cover the cost of claims.

Let's round that up to £1 billion to cover all the internal reports and enquiries and so on, which makes about one per cent of the NHS annual budget. Obviously, I don't know what the comparable figure for private hospitals is, or how much it would cost to insure against the risks.

1 comments:

Lola said...

It seems to me that there is no vlaidity in makinga comparison between the claims costs to the NHS and the cost of PI / medneg insurance for the private sector. One is based on an arbitrary bureaucratic process based rationing system in an instution suffering endemic producer capture and the other on hard nosed commercial assessments of risk.

No-one has an idea at all whether or not the compo paid out is in any way 'fair' to the claimant or the NHS.