The usual, but seemingly worsening, winter crisis and staff shortages could lead to an increase in NHS compensation claims.
At the end of the day, victims of medical negligence are entitled to justice. If your life is turned upside down and you’re left with permanent problems and unable to work, you need to make a claim. It’s the only way to try and have some form of pre-incident normality, and compensation goes a long way.
It should be the case that NHS compensation claims stem from the odd error every now and then. However, continual funding problems could cause a surge in incidents; especially at this time of the year.
Greater problems can mean more NHS compensation claims
The greater the problems faced by our public health service, the more NHS compensation claims there could be.
We cannot allow a lack of resources to leave patients vulnerable to becoming victims of negligence. We know the NHS staff are working hard, and they will particularly have their work cut out at this time of year. But these staff shortages and a lack of beds isn’t going to help. The NHS is already under-funded, and recent statistics indicated that beds are now at over 95% capacity.
There could be disasters waiting to happen up and down the country.
Prevention over NHS compensation claims
The attitude for the government must be one of prevention over the risk of increased NHS compensation claims.
As a firm of specialist medical negligence lawyers, we can’t stress enough just how badly people can suffer when things go wrong. We have seen lives turned upside down. We have seen careers lost. We have seen families struggle. The only way to allow for justice and – importantly – help for the victims is with NHS compensation claims.
But we can avoid the need for too many claims when our previous public health service is appropriately funded.
NHS compensation claims are important
Ultimately, NHS compensation claims are incredibly important to ensure that victims of medical negligence can have some form of quality of life retuned.
That being said, the key must be to limit the amount of negligence claims there are in order to allow for a safer and more efficient health service.
We do see a lot of medical negligence claims that were entirely preventable. It’s clear to us that the government needs to act.