Litigation in the NHS
This morning, I stumbled across a news story about how:
1) Last year, the top 10 NHS litigation claims are responsible for £68m of its budget.
2) all 10 of these claims were related to problems with complications in birth or pregnancy.
This bothers me on a whole series of levels. The average annual brutto salary in the UK is just over £20K. This means that the top litigants, who were on average granted £6.8m of compensation, were given 323 annual wages as a lump sum.
Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that civil litigation suits can be a way to keep businesses in check, but the NHS is a government organisation which currently is running at a £512m overspend. The past year, the NHS spent £593m on litigation cases. For a government agency run on taxpayer’s money, this is completely ridiculous. The UK only has about 60 million inhabitants, which means that each and every individual pays £10 every year, just to cover the litigation suits.
Apart from that I believe that the pay-outs are ridiculous (323 average annual wages? Preposterous and selfish, in my opinion), I also think that it is stupid that the top litigants were all in birth-related cases. Giving birth has for the bulk of history been the most dangerous thing a woman can do, and being born has historically been the most dangerous time for a child as well. There are just too many things that can go wrong. It seems as if the high pay-outs are connected with the strong feeling of entitlement to have kids, which I feel is just completely ridiculous. Quite apart from the fact that most children born these days are unplanned (not unwanted, which is an important distinction), I think that perhaps it is worth reflecting upon that when people have babies nowadays, there’s a damn good chance that both the mother and the baby emerges at the other end of the process alive and well. This is a relatively recent development, too.
C’mon, folks. Seriously. The NHS is people taking care of each other by paying taxes. Suing the hell out of the organisation is the quickest way to kill off one of the best ‘free’ health-care systems in the world.
Accountability and responsibility is a good thing. But high-payout litigation is not the way to go about it.
1 Comment »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Hmmm, I knew about this and yes, it is a *bit* silly. Even if you have a disabled child as a result of the birth going wrong it doesn’t cost *that* much to bring them up. But this is not going to stop me playing devil’s advocate to some extent.
I recall right, midwives actually have to have their own insurance in case they mess up; but this might have changed or I might be wrong about this. I remember one particular incident on the ward where there was only one midwife on duty (the other was taking a break in the middle of a long day, which is like a massively long shift) and she was delivering a baby in the pool. Something went wrong. The baby’s heart rate started to drop and the midwife wasn’t strong enough to get the mother out of the pool without making the situation potentially a whole lot worse (water, slippery floor etc). She buzzed the delivery suite for help and everyone ignored the buzzer because it had been installed relatively recently and nobody knew what it was. I don’t think the mum expected the birth to be easy but I’m pretty sure she hadn’t anticipated that scenario – thankfully in that case everyone was fine but I reckon there was at least one a month that had the potential to end up in court had the parents known what had really gone wrong and why.
I saw incident after incident where something went wrong that could have so easily been avoided. The incident report book was full of near misses. People being given the wrong drugs, people misreading test results and scans, all sorts of things you just don’t imagine would happen. Often, I was the first non-medical person to sit down and have a chat with the
parents after all the trauma had subsided. Only one parent ever told me he intended to sue.
I’m not sure he ever did but when he told me what had happened to be honest I’d have backed him up on it. His child was disabled and his wife was incapaciated for the foreseeable future (i.e. unable to even leave the house) and it was all because of lack of staffing – she’d been left in a room with no assistance for hours and although her husband had tried to get help nobody had come, by which point the unborn baby was in a really, really bad state.
But the point you’re making is the actual cost of the litigation and whether it should be happening at all to a public service, yes? I think to some extent it should when the money is needed to support a child who will never be able to be independent, will need 24 hour care and will also spend most of its life in and out of hospital. That is damn expensive and I don’t mind paying my tax towards that – up to a point. From an emotional point of view those parents are condemned to a lifetime looking after that child and whilst this is not my responsibility, I would want them to be able to give the child the care it requires. After all, the whole point of the NHS is to look after people. Or at least that’s my take on it. But I don’t see
why lawyers should make money out of this, or indeed why people should get compensation when there are no ongoing costs. Perhaps I feel it should be a payment from the NHS/government to support the family, rather than an arbitrary amount decided in a court case.
Yes, having kids is risky and always has been, and perhaps we expect too much from medical services nowdays – actually I’ve ranted about this before re. life expectancy a while back. But some of these people would have been better of staying at home, getting their husbands to deliver the baby and not going anywhere near the hospital. We have this nasty habit of trusting medical people implicitly and sometimes we shouldn’t.
Urm… I dunno. If I had the choice between £6.3m quid and a profoundly disabled child, or a healthy child and no money at all, I know which I would choose. And it’s not the money. I think most of the parents who have sued would probably feel the same; the money is a poor substitute for a normal life.
Damnit, that really was an epic.