UK Patients Crippled By NHS Receive £1.2Bn

"At the current rate of payouts about three patients every month are getting a cheque for more than £1m because of the inadequate care they received from NHS staff.

These include mistakes that have led to babies suffering horrendous brain injuries leaving them disabled for life, patients ending up paralysed from surgery and illnesses that medics failed to spot.

Some patients have lost limbs, suffered severe burns, or been left blind. Others qualifying for the payouts suffered needless internal injuries that has left them incontinent or with multiple disabilities.

Patients groups have blamed the "negligence, incompetence or carelessness" of the NHS for fuelling the compensation industry.

Each year the National Health Service Litigation Authority (NHSLA) pays out millions to people damaged by hospital care - but these figures show the true extent of the suffering and knock-on cost to the NHS in compensation due to the top end claimants."

My own experience of NHS care is that although there are individual doctors, nurses, etc who are caring, careful and competent, on the whole the service is poor and the 'care' is minimal. This is despite UK doctors being the highest-paid in Europe. I am myself disabled and in constant great pain because of the sustained negligence of NHS health professionals. Although UK citizens experience NHS care as 'free', it is, in fact, extremely expensive, the cost being borne by general taxation. The Complaints Procedures are largely exercises in futility for patients and if they go to Law it is extremely expensive for them and the system overwhelmingly favours the medics. Another avenue is to complain to the General Medical Council (the GMC), which is notorious for protecting doctors rather than protecting patients (reference). In my opinion, both the NHS and the GMC should be scrapped. So poor is NHS hospital care, that fewer than half of NHS staff would themselves choose to use it!

owever, since the NHS is the biggest employer in the country, it would be political suicide to attempt to scrap it or even to reform it substantially, so it looks as though we are going to have to continue receiving poor treatment and to pay heavily for it.

In the article the money received by the patients so gravely harmed by the NHS is described as 'compensation', but it is mainly, in fact, carefully costed money to pay for essentials like special equipment needed for the disabilities caused by the negligence, or payments for nurses and carers, etc.

Margaret Wilde www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/