This ‘No Win No Fee’ in Healthcare just cannot be right

‘No win no fee’ lawyers are making a killing out of NHS negligence cases, with 20 per cent of them getting more money than the people they represent, the Conservatives have claimed.

In the past five years, the NHS spent almost £700m on legal fees for clinical negligence claims. Last year, nearly 6000 people made claims and while the average patient got just £15,000 compensation, lawyers would get around £36,000 in costs. According to the Tories, solicitors can get up to 10 times more money than the patient and one law firm got nearly 60 times more than its client. In 2006, a firm was paid £102,334 for working on a case while the patient got £1,750 in compensation. In another case, solicitors got £62,500 in costs and the patient got £2,500.

Shadow health minister Mark Simmonds reckoned that a Tory government would make the NHS work harder to see if claims of negligence could be dealt with without involving lawyers saying: ”Under Labour, lawsuits against the NHS have spiralled out of control,” he said. “Taxpayers will be rightly angry that hundreds of millions of pounds of their money is being paid out for mistakes in the NHS and that in many cases lawyers get their hands on more of the compensation money than the patients.”

He added: “The government could have saved significant sums of money if they had listened to our proposals for an initial fact finding stage before a case comes to court. This would have resulted in more cases being resolved without costly litigation and as a result there would have been more money for front-line patient care.”

A Department for Health statement said: “The vast majority of the millions of people treated by the NHS every year experience good quality, safe and effective care. However, if patients do not receive the treatment they should and mistakes are made, it is right that they are compensated and have access to legal representation.”