Commenting on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report on 'Costs of Clinical Negligence, Matthew Maxwell Scott, Executive Director of the Association of Consumer Support Organisations, said:
"The committee rightly focuses its attention on negligence itself and the NHS’s long struggle in tackling this. Every single incident of negligence is a person harmed, a family traumatised and a life changed, often irrevocably. Reduce the harm and you improve patient outcomes and ensure more money goes to frontline care. Nowhere is this more serious than in maternity, where a staggering 14 trusts are now under investigation because of poor safety and systemic failures.
"What claimants and their families say more than anything else is that they want answers which the NHS is unwilling to provide, and to help prevent future harm to others.
"Following this publication and the recent National Audit Office report, the Department for Health and Social Care must publish David Lock KC's and its own reviews as soon as possible and ensure there is a full and open discussion about the causes of negligence and how to reduce the impact of this on patients, medical professionals and the public finances.
"Legal costs are only a small part of this, but where there are ways to control these without impinging on patient safety or access to justice they should be embraced. Some excellent work on alternate dispute resolution including joint settlement meetings is already being done by some leading claimant and defendant firms, the positive experience of these and other models should be shared and learned from.
"Fixed recoverable costs in lower-value cases has been official government policy for over a decade but eight secretaries of state for health, six prime ministers and three general elections later we are no further forward. The Department for Health and Social Care should make its mind up and, if it is to proceed, hand over responsibility for this to the Ministry of Justice or an independent body to ensure it manages its conflicts of interest as both the guardian of patient care and of taxpayers' money."