Nurses can lead on reducing NHS litigation claims by avoiding preventable harms

More than 15,000 claims were made against the NHS in England in 2015-16 for incidents involving patient harm, clinical negligence and non-clinical injuries or accidents, according to the NHS Litigation Authority’s (NHS LA) latest annual report.

Of those – 10,965 related to new clinical negligence claims in 2015-16, compared with 11,497 in 2014/15. In the same period, the NHS LA received 4,172 new non-clinical liability claims, typically employers’ and public liability claims, compared with 4,806 in 2014-15.

Although the number of new clinical negligence claims and new non-clinical claims fell by 4.6% and 13.2% respectively on the previous year’s figures, the NHS LA is concerned a total of 15,137 claims is ‘significant’ and should be addressed by the NHS with urgency.

Trial and error

NHS LA chief executive Helen Vernon says: ‘The