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The Independent
22-07-2025
- Health
- The Independent
NHS facing £27bn bill for maternity failings in England
The NHS could be facing a £27.4bn bill for maternity failings in England, an NHS annual report has revealed. It comes after several hospital scandals caused hundreds of babies and women to die or suffer life-altering conditions sparking a record number of legal claims. The potential bill for maternity negligence since 2019 is £27.4bn, according to an NHS Resolution report, the organisation that handles negligence claims for the NHS trusts in England. Hospital scandals in England have prompted health secretary Wes Streeting to launch a national investigation into NHS maternity services. The new rapid investigation will look at 'systemic' failures in maternity and neo-natal units 'up and down the country', which are leaving women and babies at a 'considerably higher' risk than they should be. The probe will focus on the 10 'worst performing' maternity services in England in a bid to drive urgent improvements to safety for pregnant women and their babies, Mr Streeting said. The NHS Resolution report which was published on Thursday revealed in 2024/25 the NHS paid out £3.1bn in compensation and associated costs overall. But because claims take some time to be reported and settled, and some claims are settled with multi-year payments into the future as Periodical Payment Orders (PPOs), the estimated 'annual cost of harm' for NHS schemes was £4.9 billion. This means almost £5 billion in compensation costs is currently incurred by the NHS in England each year for incidents that could be avoided. The estimates cost of harm from maternity incidents in 2019/20 was £5.7bn, £5.1bn in 2020/21, £8.2bn in 2021/22, £3.4 in 2022/23 and £2.5bn in both 2023/24 and 4024/25, the Guardian reported. This estimated cost is far higher than the NHS budget of £18bn for newborns over the past six years. Jeremy Hunt, the former Conservative health secretary, told the Guardian: 'It should be a matter of national shame that we now spend more on maternity litigation than the total cost of running maternity services.' However, compensation for maternity negligence only accounts for a fraction of the total £17.4bn sum, with a large share going towards legal costs. Over the past six years £24.6m has been spent on legal fees for claims that did not result in damages. Liberal Democrat hospitals spokesperson Jess Brown-Fuller said these figures show how much damage the crisis in maternity services is causing the NHS. She told the newspaper: 'The crisis in our maternity services is being laid bare through the trauma that so many families have to deal with.' A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: 'This government inherited an unacceptable situation where too many families have suffered due to failures in maternity care and the NHS has been paying billions for its mistakes, rather than fixing them. 'We are committed to breaking that cycle and providing mothers and babies with safe, compassionate care once and for all. That is why we have announced a rapid national maternity investigation to identify where things are going wrong and identify solutions.' A spokesperson also said it is setting up a National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce, rolling out a digital system to better identify safety concerns, and a new training programme to help prevent avoidable injuries at childbirth. An NHS England spokesperson said: "We recognise that too many women and families are not receiving the high-quality maternity care they deserve, and we are committed to changing this. "We are taking immediate steps to strengthen maternity services, including closer oversight of underperforming trusts, and will work with the independent investigation to ensure we learn from its findings and deliver the comprehensive changes that women and families need and deserve.' NHS Resolution said: 'The high cost of compensation arising in maternity comes from a small number of very serious incidents resulting in brain injury to a baby at birth. These incidents are devastating for families and reflect the need to make provision for life-long and complex care needs. 'NHS Resolution is committed to supporting the Government's action to drive improvements in maternal and neonatal safety. 'Our Early Notification Scheme enables an earlier investigation of compensation entitlement than has been possible in the past and for learning to be shared back more rapidly with NHS trusts. Additionally, our Maternity Incentive Scheme provides financial incentives to NHS trusts to embed safety standards. We continue to evaluate and enhance these programmes to improve outcomes for families and reduce preventable harm."
Irish Daily Mirror
11-07-2025
- Health
- Irish Daily Mirror
Irish ambulance crews called to deal with shaving cut and high temperature
People have dialled 999 and had an ambulance sent to them after suffering a high temperature, a pain in their tummy and a cut shaving, we can reveal. These are just some of the scandalous calls that paramedics have been sent to deal with across the country in the past fortnight - leaving less crews free to deal with real life or death emergencies. Now ambulance crews say they are seriously frustrated with the Advanced Medical Priority Dispatch System - AMPDS - which deals with the 999 calls. They claim it over-prioritises certain calls and sends ambulances out when there are no lives in danger. They are being sent long distances for non-emergency calls and it is putting lives at risk elsewhere. The NHS in Britain have had a similar system for years but now some NHS Trusts are phasing it out and replacing it with a new Pathway system. One senior paramedic said: "There are serious flaws in our dispatch system. Each call is supposed to be triaged in terms of the risk to life but it is not happening in certain cases. "Only last week we had to drive two hours to Monaghan Hospital to pick up a patient with a high temperature and bring them to Cavan because there were no doctors around after hours in was little or nothing wrong with the patient. "In another case we were sent to the Cooley Peninsula to pick up a woman with a simple pain in her stomach. She was waiting with her little bag to be brought to the hospital. "There is absolutely no way an ambulance should have been sent out to her. A relative should have brought her to her GP first. "There are people out there who think the ambulance service is a transport service and they think they will be treated quicker in hospital if they go by ambulance." But the paramedic told how last week things went from bad to worse. They were being sent out to deal with a patient with a pain in Meath and then got a call about a young girl who had gone into a diabetic coma. The pain call was dropped and they went and saved the teenager's life. The ambulance driver said: "If we had gone on the other call there would not have been an ambulance crew around to deal with the coma case and that girl would have died. "What is happening is just insane. We also had a man who called 999 a few days ago at 2am after cutting himself shaving three days previously. "It turned out he was drunk and had pricked his face where it had bled. He was fixed in 10 seconds with a plaster. "There is no way an ambulance should have been sent to deal with him. "Most of the crews across the country don't trust the AMPDS dispatch system and it is leaving towns without an ambulance and no cover if a serious incident occurs. "But because the shaving man mentioned blood it was prioritised as a life threatening situation and we were sent out to deal with him. "The ambulance service is supposed to be dealing with emergencies but in many cases, it is not. "People are really abusing the system by calling for an ambulance when there is nothing seriously wrong with them. "And unfortunately our dispatch system is letting them away with it and sending us out to treat them when there is clearly no life at risk." The National Ambulance Service said it has no plans to discontinue the use of AMPDS and also uses a clinical hub of specialised paramedics, doctors and nurses to help triage the 1,200 emergency calls it receives every 24 hours. It stated: "The nature of phone triage is such that the call taker must rely solely on the verbal information passed to them and the resulting categorisation will depend entirely on the information shared or available at the time. "As with any triage system in practice, the risks of over-triaging are balanced against the risks of a very sick patient not being detected. Consequently, occasional occurrences of over triage may be expected."
Sky News
10-07-2025
- Health
- Sky News
New data shows cancer treatment waiting times have increased in nearly half of NHS areas this year: see how your trust is performing
Why you can trust Sky News Today's figures show that in May the NHS waiting list in England fell, for the third month in a row. There are now 7.36 million outstanding appointments – the lowest level since March 2023. Health Secretary Wes Streeting welcomed the reduction in the NHS waiting list of 282,000 since Labour took office, down from 7.64 million last July. Speaking in the Commons, he highlighted the experience of a young cancer patient receiving timely treatment as an example of the difference he says Labour has brought to the NHS. But not all waiting times are down. Sky News analysis shows that in nearly half (number in brackets) of 147 NHS trusts with available data fewer people are now being treated for cancer within the target than at the start of the year. That target is for 85% of cancer patients to begin treatment within two months of their diagnosis. Only a small number of trusts have achieved this. While 20 trusts met the standard in January, it is down to 15 trusts in May. Performance against the target fell in 62 areas overall between Jan and May, and none of those were meeting the target to begin with. Among the worst performing trusts are Mid and South Essex, and Hull University Teaching Hospital, with just 42% and 46% of patients beginning treatment within the target time respectively. The biggest increases in waits were in North Cumbria Integrated Care, where the share of people treated within the target period fell from 70% to 50%, and in Liverpool Women's NHS Foundation Trust, the share fell from 44% to just 26%. It's not only cancer waits where there are big differences in how long you wait for treatment depending on where you access services. The government has pledged to bring down referral waiting times by 2029, so that no more than 8% patients wait longer than 18 weeks for hospital treatment once they've been referred by a GP. This has not been achieved in England for a decade, but some areas are doing better than others. Several trusts are only managing to ensure less than half of their appointments are offered within the time frame, including just 48% at the Countess of Chester Hospital. This compares to the 99.8% of nearly 4,000 patients treated by Kent Community Health within 18 weeks. Only 13 of the 153 NHS service providers are meeting the target, while many are performing worse than at the start of the year. The largest decreases were around a 6% decrease in performance, including in Dartford and Gravesham, where performance fell to 60% on target, and in Royal Surrey County Hospital, falling to 55%. Just over half - 84 - of the trusts are currently managing to complete 60% of appointments within 18 weeks - which is an interim target they are due to meet by March 2026. Overall, the share of those waiting for longer than 18 weeks has remained mostly static at around 40%. The latest figures show that 39% of the waiting list had been waiting for longer than target in May, compared to 41% in July last year. In Accident and Emergency, nearly one in four trusts have a greater share of patients waiting for longer than the four-hour target to be seen than in January - despite A&Es tending to be more stretched during winter months. However, performance on this target is better than others overall, and around half of those performing worse are still meeting the target, which is that 95% of patients are seen within four hours of arrival. To improve and alleviate pressure on hospital services the government says the health service must "reform or die". Labour has set out its vision in a 10-year plan for NHS reform aiming to prioritise community healthcare, shift from late treatment to early intervention, and digitally transform the health service. But addressing hospital performance and inequalities will be key, Stephen Rock, economist at independent health care thinktank The Health Foundation, told Sky News. "There is considerable variation across the NHS-particularly post-pandemic. Take delayed discharges, for example: some hospitals discharge patients much faster than others once they're ready to leave. Reducing this variation is essential to maximising the return on NHS investment," he said. There is no new data available on delayed discharges - where patients are kept for longer than they should be in hospital due to a lack of resource in social care or other services to move them on - as data is only published over winter. Data from last winter shows that the number of delayed discharges from hospital has barely budged, at just under 14,000 a day on average in January 2025 - with almost identical figures over the past three years. Thea Stein, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust independent health and social care thinktank, told Sky News that the lack of references to social care in the 10-year plan is "disappointing", as "a proportion of people are stuck in every single hospital in this country because of issues to do with social care and the way in which it is funded," she said. Social care funding will be addressed separately in a review to be conducted by Dame Louise Casey, which may not reach a conclusion until towards the end of this parliament. Rising demand and funding challenges A growing and aging population is one reason demand for healthcare rises every year. Another reason is new technology and treatments, much of which the government is hoping to embrace. "This is why budgets grow. It isn't purely waste, inefficiency, growing population, and growing ill health," Ms Stein explained. And while technology offers potential benefits, adopting it is often expensive. Recent analysis by the Nuffield Trust found that of £22.6bn additional funding between 2023/2024 and 2025/26, 19% will be spent on increased costs of care relating to a growing and aging population, as more people live with health conditions for longer. Higher demand for new treatments will take up 29% extra funding. The largest cost pressure, however, is inflation-related price rises, including recent pay settlements, which eat into more than half the total uplift in the budget. Funding allocated to the NHS for day-to-day spending in the latest spending review amounts to a real terms increase of £29bn annually by 2028/29, or a 2.7% rise from 2023/24 levels - the largest uplift for any department. However, while slightly above the average annual rise for spending reviews since 2010, it is below the 3.3% average increase in the five years leading up to the review, and only slightly higher than average increases from a decade earlier. And at that time the NHS was not undergoing major reforms. But the government says that "the era of the NHS's answer always being 'more money, never reform' is over", and that savings made by improving productivity and increasing population health will help them achieve their targets. The NHS will need to deliver a 2% increase in productivity per year - which means a 2% increase in activity across services from the same level of funding - to meet targets with the funding available. This is more than twice the level that has been achieved in recent years, according to The Health Foundation. Unexpected shocks - such as upcoming strikes or increasing costs of medicines, could make this more challenging. The Data and Forensics
Daily Mail
23-06-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
BREAKING NEWS England's DEADLIEST maternity units to be investigated as Streeting launches urgent review into scandal-hit NHS services
Wes Streeting has today announced a 'rapid national investigation' into England's maternity units following a litany of scandals that have rocked the NHS. The new investigation is intended to provide truth to families suffering harm, as well as driving urgent improvements to care and safety. It comes after Mr Streeting met families who have lost babies and amid the ongoing investigations at some NHS trusts into poor maternity care. Announcing the move at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, he said the 10 most at risk units will be investigated. It will also look at the maternity and neo-natal system as a whole. The review will be based on the similar investigation taken into the overall review of the NHS carried out by Lord Darzi. It follows a series of maternity failures including Shrewsbury and Telford and East Kent NHS Trusts, with a record number of services now failing to meet safety standards. Last year, the maternity regulator also found two-thirds of services either 'require improvement' or are 'inadequate' for safety. In a statement, Mr Streeting said: 'Over the last year, I've been wrestling with how we tackle problems in maternity and neonatal units, and I've come to the realisation that while there is action we can take now, we have to acknowledge that this has become systemic. 'It's not just a few bad units. Up and down the country, maternity units are failing, hospitals are failing, trusts are failing, regulators are failing. 'There's too much obfuscation; too much passing the buck and giving lip service.' He added: 'I have been meeting bereaved families from across the country who have lost babies or suffered serious harm during what should have been the most joyful time in their lives. 'What they have experienced is devastating—deeply painful stories of trauma, loss, and a lack of basic compassion—caused by failures in NHS maternity care that should never have happened. 'Their bravery in speaking out has made it clear. We must act and we must act now. 'I know nobody wants better for women and babies than the thousands of NHS midwives, obstetricians, maternity and neonatal staff, and that the vast majority of births are safe and without incident, but it's clear something is going wrong. 'That's why I've ordered a rapid national investigation to make sure these families get the truth and the accountability they deserve, and ensure no parent or baby is ever let down again. I want staff to come with us on this, to improve things for everyone. 'We're also taking immediate steps to hold failing services to account and give staff the tools they need to deliver the kind, safe, respectful care every family deserves. 'Maternity care should be the litmus test by which this Government is judged on patient safety, and I will do everything in my power to ensure no family has to suffer like this again.' Frontline midwives have previously warned working in the NHS is like playing a 'warped game of Russian roulette ', as there was a risk of harm or death at any time, partly due to 'dangerously' low staffing levels. The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) suggests staff shortages and lack of funding is making it harder for midwives to deliver better quality services. The RCM's latest calculation is that England is short of 2,500 midwives. It also comes as another report into the 'postcode lottery' of NHS maternity care last May also ruled good care is 'the exception rather than the rule'. A hugely-anticipated parliamentary inquiry into birth trauma, which heard evidence from more than 1,300 women, found pregnant women are being treated like a 'slab of meat'. At the time, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins labelled testimonies heard in the report 'harrowing' and vowed to improve maternity care for 'women throughout pregnancy, birth and the critical months that follow'.
The Irish Sun
15-06-2025
- Health
- The Irish Sun
Millions will be able to sign up for ‘life-changing' clinical trials through the NHS app
MILLIONS will be able to sign up for 'life-changing' clinical trials through the NHS app. Health Secretary Advertisement 2 Health Secretary Wes Streeting is making medical research studies available to join via smartphone Credit: Getty The move could slash trial set-up times from 250 days to 150 or fewer by next year. Patients will receive push notifications from the app matching them to relevant studies based on their health data. NHS Trusts will be ranked on trial performance. Funding will be prioritised for the best. Advertisement READ MORE ON NHS The moves are part of He said: 'The app will become the digital front door to the NHS. "It will enable us to play our part in developing the medicines of the future.' Wes Streeting brutally slams Kemi AND Farage and demands Tories say sorry for how they ran the NHS in blistering attack 2 Millions will be able to sign up for 'life-changing' clinical trials through the NHS app Credit: PA Advertisement
