The NHS has been rightly lauded as one of the crowning achievements of the post-War social settlement. It contains hundreds of thousands of highly-skilled, dedicated and caring professionals who are trying to do their best for their patients - and is paid for out of our taxes.

So, is it right to claim against the NHS when one of those dedicated staff makes a mistake? After all, they are only human and everyone makes mistakes at one time or another. Is this just another case of lawyers ambulance-chasing and people out to make a quick buck?

Actually, no. Our dedicated team has been working as specialists in medical negligence claims for over 30 years and we have acted for thousands of clients. This is what we have noticed:

• Many of our clients cite as one of their motivating factors that they don’t want the same thing to happen to someone else – that the Trust must learn from its errors.
• In many serious cases, the motivation is to regain financial security which our clients have lost because they have e.g. lost their earning capacity or used up their savings because of their injury, or to achieve such security for their disabled child.
• Many of our clients find that the social security and welfare systems are frankly inadequately resourced and cannot meet their needs, leaving the family struggling to provide the required care and support.
• Some of our clients feel that they have been brushed aside by the system, that they have not had a satisfactory outcome from the NHS complaints procedure and they want to find out what has happened and why.
• Only about 11,000 claims against NHS Trusts are notified each year – which is far less than the suspected number of adverse incidents.
• Injured patients come to see us very often years after the events - sometimes even too late to claim – and do not rush to see a lawyer at the first opportunity, despite what some newspapers might have you believe.

What about the cost to the NHS in both compensation and legal costs? Yes, hospital negligence is expensive to the taxpayer - £1.6 billion in the last financial year, but this must be seen in the context of the overall budget of the NHS of around £122 billion.

But the NHS does not pay out compensation unless negligence and injury can be proved, and negligence in law means substandard practice - that is that the Trust’s employees have acted in a way that other members of their profession would deem as below the acceptable level of competence. So if a claim is successful it means that the NHS has accepted that its patient has been injured needlessly.

Maybe justice is out of fashion these days but many feel that where there has been an avoidable error causing them injury, they have a moral as well as legal right to recompense.

For a consultation with one of our legal team, please contact us for a call back or message us your enquiry.