Maternity Services: Negligence

NHS Resolution (NHSR) manages clinical negligence and other claims against the National Health Service in England. The following table shows the number of clinical negligence claims where the periodical payment orders (PPO) or settlement was equal or above the £4.75 million threshold, where payments were made for 'life-changing' injuries, excluding 'fatality' at any level, within the specialty of obstetrics, each year from 2019/20 to 2023/24:

Notes:

1. NHSR cannot break down the table by an adult and child split as NHSR often receive claims from both the mother and child for the same incident. NHSR’s coding does not distinguish who the claim relates to and so they have provided the data based on incidents preceding April 2001, with a presumption that a claimant continuing to receive payments for such an incident would be an adult by 2019;
2. in terms of life-changing injuries, NHSR does not code for this and therefore cannot provide data. The term life-changing injuries could also have various meanings. NHSR has, however, provided data using its actuarial value for PPO payments, which is over £4.7 million. Any case which is estimated to settle over this value will have life-changing injuries. There will be claims below that level that have life changing injuries, but this is the best way that NHSR can try and provide this data; and
3. as the data relates to payments made during the relevant financial years, it is also possible that the same claim may appear more than once in the dataset. For example, one payment is made in 2021/22, and a separate payment is made in 2022/23 for the same claim.