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The NHS paid out record sums in damages and legal costs for alleged mistakes and negligence by medical professionals last year.
In 2023/24, the cost of settling clinical negligence claims increased to £2.8bn from £2.7bn the previous year.
Half the costs were associated with poor maternity care, an annual report from the health service’s legal authority revealed.
Source: Independent, 29 July 2024
Union leaders have said cleaners, porters, catering assistants, security guards and other healthcare staff employed to work in NHS hospitals should also receive the same pay rise as NHS staff.
Recently, most NHS staff were given a pay rise of 3%, but now Unison have said those working privately in the NHS may be at risk of not getting the same increase in pay.
"NHS staff have the benefit of a national pay system, but those not directly employed are missing out, often because of complex contracting arrangements, penny-pinching practices and the hard-nosed pursuit of profit. Staff in the NHS work on one site as one team, from maintaining clean and safe wards to ensuring patients are fed and cared for. No-one delivering NHS services should be paid less than their directly-employed colleagues." Says General secretary Christina McAnea.
Source: BBC News, 02 August 2021
Suffering is “the new norm” in the NHS and people can expect to spend their last few years in pain, the outgoing chairman of the British Medical Association said.
Chaand Nagpaul, who steps down this week, said the NHS was in a “perilous state”. He also wants people to have sympathy for the “plight” of junior doctors, who have said they will prepare for a ballot on strikes over pay.
There are 6.5 million people on NHS waiting lists, many of whom have been waiting a year or more. Nagpaul, who has been a GP for 33 years, said: “I have not come across this scale of suffering, of unmet need. And what we’re going to be seeing is people spending the last years of their lives, literally in pain, unable . . . to have a hip operation. That will be the final years of their lives.”
He said there was a “whole, larger population of patients just literally not featuring in the statistics” waiting for outpatient treatment, mental health care and diabetes checks.
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Source: The Times, 27 June 2022
Patients will be able to anonymously log concerns about their NHS treatment, via a phone app, as part of efforts to boost safety. The new strategy will see the creation of a centralised portal, allowing patients, their families and staff to record problems with medical devices, errors in medicines administration, or difficulties in spotting a patient’s condition deteriorating. Officials said that swift recording of such information would enable them to alert the rest of the NHS more quickly to risks of serious harm, and prevent tragedies being repeated.
Source: The Telegraph, 29 June 2019
NHS patients in England who have been waiting more than two years for surgery are being offered hospital treatment in alternative parts of the country.
More than 6,000 long-term waiting-list patients are being offered travel and accommodation costs where appropriate to help the NHS through the backlog.
Health officials want to ensure nobody is waiting more than two years by the end of July.
Three patients waiting for surgery in Derby have already received treatment in the Northumbria health region, with another two patients booked in, NHS England said.
And in south-west London, 17 orthopaedic patients from the South West of England are being treated, with another 11 patients set to follow in the coming weeks.
Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid said the number of two-year waits had already reduced by two-thirds since January.
"Innovations like this are helping to tackle waiting lists and speed up access to treatment, backed by record investment," he said.
But British Medical Association leader Dr Chaand Nagpaul is warning that attempts to address what he called a "once in a generation backlog of unimaginable proportions" would be undermined by a lack of staff and beds.
Source: BBC News, 27 June 2022
A combination of Covid, flu, and Strep A has seen more than a dozen trusts and ambulance services declare critical incidents in recent days.
NHS patients are sleeping in their cars outside hospitals, as the chaos engulfing the health service is set to last until Easter.
Some 13% of hospital beds in England are filled with people with Covid or flu, NHS England figures show, with the treatment backlog also at a record high of 7.2 million.
But Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents health service managers, said no reprieve is expected until April.
"It seems likely that the next three months will be defined by further critical incidents needing to be declared and the quality of care being compromised," he told the Guardian.
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Source: The Telegraph, 3 January 2023
NHS patients raising safety concerns are too often “gaslighted”, “fobbed off” or dismissed as “difficult women”, according to England’s patient safety commissioner, who criticised health leaders for a “relentless focus” on finance and productivity.
Dr Henrietta Hughes said patients and loved ones sounding the alarm about substandard care should be an early indicator of danger or potential harm, but far too frequently they were completely ignored. NHS trusts focusing too much on budgets meant that “the culture becomes toxic, and we’re just on the road back to the Mid Staffs scandal”, she added.
Hughes was referring to the failures at Mid Staffordshire NHS foundation trust, where hundreds of patients were neglected, dismissed or ignored between 2005 and 2009. Some were left lying in their own urine, unable to eat, drink or take essential medication.
“The patient’s anecdote is the canary in the coalmine,” she said. “It’s the thing that tells us there’s something going wrong. But too often we hear about patients who have raised concerns being gaslighted, dismissed, and fobbed off.”
Source: The Guardian, 10 July 2024
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Patients are being put at risk by NHS bosses launching “sham investigations” into whistleblowers to shut down concerns, a former hospital chief executive who won a £1.4m bullying claim has said.
Dr Susan Gilby took over as chief executive at the Countess of Chester hospital in 2018 after it was rocked by the Lucy Letby case. She was awarded the payout – one of the biggest in NHS history – last month after a tribunal ruled she had been unfairly dismissed after raising concerns about alleged bullying and harassment by the chair of the hospital board.
An employment judge found that board members of the hospital conspired to unfairly exclude her and deleted documents when she launched legal action.
Speaking to the Guardian, Gilby said she had been “traumatised” by the experience and made to feel like a “pariah in the NHS” for refusing to drop her concerns in return for a “non-job”.
“I feel desperately saddened that my NHS career has come to an end in the way it has. It’s had a really deep psychological impact [and] probably taken at least 10 years of working life away from me,” she said.
“It’s been very isolating. People walk away when they realise you’re not willing to play by the NHS playbook and accept the offer to get you out of the situation. Doing that has resulted in being made to feel that I’m a pariah in the NHS.”
Tribunal judges found that Ian Haythornthwaite, the chair of the Countess of Chester hospital NHS foundation trust, worked with three other senior figures to “engineer her dismissal” after Gilby raised a whistleblowing complaint about his “bullying and harassment”.
Source: The Guardian, 1 February 2026
Far fewer people are having surgery or cancer treatment because COVID-19 has disrupted NHS services so dramatically, and those who do are facing the longest waits on record.
NHS figures reveal huge falls in the number of patients who have been going into hospital for a range of vital care in England since the pandemic began in March, prompting fears that their health will have worsened because diseases and conditions went untreated.
Patients have been unable to access a wide range of normal care since non-COVID-19 services were suspended in hospitals in March so the NHS could focus on treating the disease. Many patients were also afraid to go into hospital in case they became infected, which contributed to a fall in treatment volumes.
Tim Gardner, a senior policy fellow at the Health Foundation thinktank, said: “The dramatic falls in people visiting A&E, urgent referrals for suspected cancer and routine hospital procedures during lockdown are all growing evidence that more people are going without the care they need for serious health conditions."
“Early diagnosis and prompt treatment of cancer is crucial to saving lives, and delays in referrals and treatment during the pandemic are likely to mean more people are diagnosed later when their illness is further advanced and harder to treat.”
Source: Guardian, 9 July 2020
Britons are facing some of the “most severe” shortages of NHS medicines on record including common painkillers, epilepsy drugs and HRT, health leaders have warned, even forcing some patients with impaired digestive systems to skip meals.
The National Pharmacy Association (NPA) has warned that medicine shortages pose a “serious risk to patient safety”.
The Royal College of GPs has also raised concerns about the impact medicine shortages have on patients, GPs and pharmacists.
Both have highlighted long-lasting supply issues affecting Estradot, a hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for menopausal women, and Creon, a drug taken by people with pancreatic cancer and cystic fibrosis to help them digest food.
Britons are facing some of the “most severe” shortages of NHS medicines on record including common painkillers, epilepsy drugs and HRT, health leaders have warned, even forcing some patients with impaired digestive systems to skip meals.
Olivier Picard, a pharmacist who chairs the NPA, said: “Medicine shortages are becoming more frequent, lasting longer and causing increasing disruption for patients.”
“These shortages are some of the most severe the UK has experienced. It is deeply distressing to find patients who have travelled from pharmacy to pharmacy to find the medicines they need without success.”
He said shortages were “frustrating and worrying”, and that “in some instances they pose a serious risk to patient safety”.
Source: The Guardian, 18 June 2026
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Patients are being squeezed onto wards, forced to have intimate examinations in front of each other and left dying in hospital corridors as nurses are forced to play “trolley tetris”, NHS staff have revealed.
Testimonies from nurses, given to the Royal College of Nursing and seen by The Independent, reveal they are regularly forced into “unsafe” practices, such as squeezing more patients into wards with insufficient space and staffing.
The warnings come as the RCN has urged the next government to act on the “national emergency” with a survey of thousands of nurses revealing patients are being left without access to oxygen and put in undignified situations.
RCN deputy chief nurse Lynn Woolsey said in May: “We have increasing evidence from members up and down the country of patients being cared for in undesignated bed spaces, vending machines being moved out of A&E to make space for patients, two patients being put in one bed space, with one patient being asked to face the wall while a rectal exam was carried out on the other patient... shocking, shocking information and situations.”
In the face of the worsening A&E and ambulance waiting times last year, The Independent revealed hospital staff in many areas were ordered to move patients from emergency departments on, regardless of space.
In one example, a nurse said her trust ordered workers to accept patients from A&E at midday every day, adding: “Doesn’t matter what capacity A&E is or the ward. It’s just what has to be done. We have no space, no tables, no curtains.”
Source: The Independent, 3 June 2024
People are dying in the back of ambulances and up to 160,000 more a year are coming to harm because they are stuck outside hospitals unable to be offloaded to A&E, a bombshell report has revealed.
Patients are also dying soon after finally getting admitted to hospital after spending long periods in the back of an ambulance, while others still in their own homes are not being saved because paramedics are trapped at A&E and unable to answer 999 calls, said the report by NHS ambulance service bosses in England.
In addition, about 12,000 of the 160,000 are suffering “severe harm” such as a permanent setback to their health. These include people with life-threatening health emergencies such as chest pains, sepsis, heart problems, epilepsy and COVID-19 because growing numbers of paramedics are having to wait increasingly long times to hand over a patient to A&E staff.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats said the “staggering” extent of damage to patients’ health underlined the risks posed by the deepening crisis facing NHS ambulance services.
The report, seen by the Guardian, has been drawn up by the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE) and is based on official NHS figures, which until now were secret. AACE represents the chief executives of England’s 10 regional ambulance services, all of which have had to declare an alert in recent months after being faced with unprecedented demands for help.
It concludes that: “When very sick patients arrive at hospital and then have to wait an excessive time for handover to emergency department clinicians to receive assessment and definitive care, it is entirely predictable and almost inevitable that some level of harm will arise.
“This may take the form of a deteriorating medical or physical condition, or distress and anxiety, potentially affecting the outcome for patients and definitely creating a poor patient experience.”
Source: The Guardian, 14 November 2021
A decade-long failure to address urgent repairs in hospitals across England has led to a dramatic rise in issues posing a “high risk” to patients and staff, ministers are being warned.
The cost of dealing with this backlog has almost tripled since 2015 in real terms, to £2.7bn this year. High-risk repairs have been the fastest growing part of the lengthy maintenance list over that time. It includes issues that could lead to serious injury to both staff and patients, or to major disruption of services or “catastrophic failure”.
The NHS lost more than 600 days – or 14,500 hours – of clinical time because of infrastructure failures in the last year, according to a new analysis seen by the Observer. The total maintenance backlog has now ballooned to £13.8bn in 2023-24, an 18% increase from last year. The figure is more than the NHS’s entire capital budget for the year.
Source: Guardian, 28 December 2024
Some NHS dental patients have been asked to pay for private care "if they want any treatment", according to a watchdog. Others are facing waits of up to two years for an NHS appointment, Healthwatch England has warned.
One patient was in so much pain he decided to extract his own teeth, said its chairman Sir Robert Francis QC.
The NHS said over 650 urgent dental hubs have been set up so patients can access a dentist.
Hundreds of people contacted Healthwatch England between October and December last year complaining about dentistry issues.
A briefing document from the watchdog said that "a lack of NHS dentist appointments" remains the most common issue - with people asked to wait for up to two years.
Source: BBC News, 8 February 2021
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The way patient safety is regulated and monitored is to be completely overhauled in England, the health secretary has announced.
Wes Streeting said the current system was "overly complex", as he set out a review of six key organisations.
It comes as further changes to the way the Care Quality Commission, the regulator of NHS services, operates have been unveiled.
The regulator, which inspects 90,000 different services across health and care, has been told to focus much more on key services such as hospitals, GPs and social care, after an interim report, in July, warned it was failing.
Streeting said: "Patient safety is the bedrock of a healthy NHS and social-care system.
"That's why we are taking steps to reform the CQC, to root out poor performance and ensure patients can have confidence in its ratings once again.
"The government will never turn a blind eye to failure.
"An overly complex system of healthcare regulation and oversight is no good for patients.
"We will overhaul the system to make it effective and efficient to protect patient safety."
The latest announcement coincides with the publication of the final report into the CQC review, led by Dr Penny Dash.
Source: BBC News, 15 October 2024
A woman who may only have months to live has told the BBC she is "angry and frustrated" at being in hospital five months after being cleared to go home.
Charlotte Mills-Murray, 34, said attempts to organise care at her family home had been repeatedly delayed.
Charlotte lives with intestinal failure caused by a severe form of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which weakens her body's connective tissue.
She was admitted to St James's Hospital in Leeds in June 2022 following an infection, and a new Hickman line - a tube that allows feeding and the administering of pain relief - was inserted.
By November, Charlotte was told she was well enough to be cared for at home, but she remains in hospital following delays in the hiring and training of staff able to support her.
With limited access to a hoist which would enable her to use her wheelchair, Charlotte said she had spent 10 months "stuck in bed".
Because of the complexity of her condition, Charlotte only has months to live. She believes her situation merits greater urgency because of the increased risk of infection in hospital.
Charlotte qualifies for 24-hour home care support through the NHS Continuing Healthcare scheme, but she said decisions over how this would be put in place had been slow and unclear.
The BBC has found a 16% rise over the past year in the number of patients in England who are in hospital despite being well enough to leave.
The Department of Health and Social Care said it was "fully committed to speeding up the safe discharge of patients who no longer need to be in hospital" and was making £1.6bn available in England over the next two years to support this, on top of £700m of extra funding in 2022 to ease NHS pressures over the winter.
Source: BBC News, 9 April 2023
The NHS has ordered a new chair for the Nottingham maternity scandal review which is looking into hundreds of cases of alleged poor care.
In a letter published late on Friday the NHS said there needed to be “urgent” changes to the way the review was being carried out and this included appointing a former NHS trust chair Julie Dent to lead the review.
More than 100 bereaved families wrote to the health secretary Sajid Javid on 7 April calling for the review, to be overhauled and the chair Cathy Purt, to be replaced by Donna Ockenden who chaired the Shrewsbury maternity scandal inquiry.
The Nottingham review, dubbed an “independent thematic review”, was launched in July 2021 and is being led by local NHS commissioners and NHS England.
It was announced after The Independent and Channel 4 revealed millions had been paid out by the trust over 30 baby deaths and 46 incidents of babies left permanently brain damaged by Nottingham University Hospitals Foundation Trust.
Sir David Sloman, the NHS chief operating officer, said in his letter on Friday: “Following discussions at both a regional and national level, it is clear that urgent changes to how the review is being delivered need to be made. A new chair needs to lead this review with sufficient senior experience to address the concerns and challenges faced at Nottingham University Hospitals, to speed up the process and to deliver a review that can bring about real change for women and babies in Nottingham.
“It has therefore been agreed that the review will now have enhanced national oversight by NHS England and NHS Improvement and I am pleased to announce that Julie Dent CBE has agreed to take on the role of chair for this review and she will begin this work with immediate effect.”
Source: The Independent, 23 April 2022
Hundreds of NHS patients are set to be removed from a privately-run mental health hospital following a string of allegations of patient abuse and neglect.
Health chiefs have ordered 287 inpatients to be removed from one of the sites run by St Andrew’s Healthcare after The Independent revealed it has faced several police investigations into allegations of abuse, rape and patient deaths.
The mental health hospital provider, which is a registered charity, can house more than 400 NHS patients at its Northampton site, some of whom are sent to the facility for specialist mental health care.
On Monday, NHS England issued a letter to local health chiefs ordering them to plan to move patients from the site. Patients will be transferred to other hospitals or discharged.
The letter comes after NHS England officials issued a warning to St Andrew’s Health in December 2025 over allegations of poor care.
In January, The Independent revealed St Andrew’s Healthcare had more than a dozen staff members arrested in relation to multiple police probes.
Source: The Independent, 9 March 2026
NHS pathology labs were given just two days to roll out thousands of antibody tests, amid a push to reach a COVID-19 testing target set out by Boris Johnson.
Earlier this month the Prime Minister set a target of having a testing capacity of 200,000 per day by the end of May. Capacity currently stands at 161,000, Matt Hancock has said.
Until now there has been very limited use of antibody tests, with most capacity used to deliver PCR tests that indicate whether someone currently has the virus. Antibody tests are intended to identify whether someone has previously had the virus.
On 27 May, NHS England and Improvement wrote to local leaders giving them two days’ notice to put in place testing capacity for, and deliver, thousands of antibody tests of staff and patients.
In one letter to leaders in the south east, seen by HSJ, the regulator said labs were expected to establish capacity and deliver 6,000 tests daily by 29 May. A senior source from London confirmed to HSJ the region had also been given a target of 6,000. There are seven local regions in the NHS, which would indicate around 42,000 tests per day, which if PCR testing continued at the current levels, could enable the government to meet the 200,000 target.
One head of pathology at a trust said: “There is one obvious answer as to why there is suddenly such an urgency to roll this out. While it will be interesting to have the results, there is nothing meaningful we can do with this test data at the moment.”
Another trust director involved in the scheme described the antibody tests as having “no clinical value”.
Source: HSJ, 29 May 2020
The number of operations cancelled by the NHS in England because of staff shortages may have doubled in three years, with an estimated 30,000 not proceeding because no staff were available to perform them.
At least a third of cancelled operations were those that were deemed urgent, according to the analysis by Labour. It suggested at least 2,500 cancelled operations for cancer patients and 8,000 on children.
It found staff shortages were the most common reason given for cancellations by hospitals, accounting for one in five of all operations cancelled for non-clinical reasons last year.
The Department of Health and Social Care said it was “misleading” to extrapolate that figure from the data in the FOIs. “Thousands of elective appointments and procedures had to be cancelled during the pandemic to protect the NHS, and since then we’ve been focused on delivering the biggest catch-up programme in health history - virtually eliminating the longest 2-year waits for treatment,” a spokesman said.
In total, 158,000 operations were cancelled for issues including equipment failures, a shortage of beds, and 5,700 because of equipment failure, administrative errors, and theatre lists overrunning. Labour cited one case that involved a 72-year-old woman who had two operations to remove a brain tumour cancelled in September, blamed on a lack of available beds.
About 9,500 operations were cancelled because an emergency case took priority, and 250 due to adverse weather.
Separate figures from the NHS show record numbers of operations cancelled at the last minute are not rearranged to take place within a month, with one in five patients waiting longer.
Source: The Guardian, 12 December 2022
Hospitals are having to cancel operations and cancer scans are going unread for weeks because consultant doctors have suddenly begun working to rule in a standoff over NHS pensions. Doctors say the dispute is escalating so quickly that it will send NHS services “into meltdown” and is so serious that it poses “an existential threat” to the health service’s survival.
Source: The Guardian, 8 July 2019
The NHS has to train two GPs to produce one full-time family doctor because so many have started to work part-time, new research reveals.
The finding helps explain why GP surgeries are still struggling to give patients appointments as quickly as they would like, despite growing numbers of doctors training to become a GP.
The disclosure is contained in a report by the Nuffield Trust health thinktank that lays bare the large number of nurses, midwives and doctors who quit during their training or early in their careers.
“These high dropout rates are in nobody’s interest,” said Dr Billy Palmer, a senior fellow at the thinktank and co-author of the report. “They’re wasteful for the taxpayer, often distressing for the students and staff who leave, stressful for the staff left behind, and ultimately erode the NHS’s ability to deliver safe and high-quality care.”
Source: The Guardian, 28 September 2023
The NHS is set to eliminate hepatitis C in England by 2025 due to targeted screening campaigns for those at risk and effective drug treatments, according to health officials. NHS England said the measures are helping to dramatically cut deaths from the virus five years ahead of global targets.
Deaths from hepatitis C – including liver disease and cancer – have fallen by 35% since NHS England struck a five-year deal worth almost £1bn to buy antiviral drugs for thousands of patients in 2018.
The World Health Organization’s target of a 10% reduction in hepatitis C-related death by 2020 has been exceeded threefold in England.
An NHS screening programme launched in September is also enabling up to 80,000 people unknowingly living with the disease to get a diagnosis and treatment sooner by searching health records for key risk factors, such as historic blood transfusions or HIV.
Prof Sir Stephen Powis, NHS England’s national medical director, said the health service was “leading the world” in the drive to save lives and eliminate hepatitis C while also tackling health inequalities.
He said: “Thanks to targeted screening and because the NHS has a proven track record of striking medicine agreements that give patients access to the latest drugs, we are on track to beat global targets and become the first country to eliminate hepatitis C.”
Source: The Guardian, 28 December 2022
Hospitals are not equipped to deal with the surge in screenings and tests as the health service restarts care – leaving patients facing delays in diagnosis and treatment for conditions including cancer, according to medical leaders.
As the NHS tries to recover from the worst of the coronavirus crisis, more than a million laboratory samples from cancer screening services are expected in pathology labs, while as many as 850,000 delayed CT and MRI scans need to be carried out.
But 97% of labs do not have enough pathologists to carry out the work – with staff already working unpaid hours to tackle the existing backlog – while the number of radiology posts nationally would need to be increased by a third to deal with the rise, experts say. Precautions to protect against the spread of coronavirus also limits the number of scans that can be carried out. The royal colleges of pathologists and radiologists warned that cancers would go undiagnosed and treatments for all patients across the NHS could be further delayed as a result.
Source: The Independent, 27 August 2020
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The boss of Britain’s biggest medicines courier has been told to urgently improve its complaints system by the NHS ombudsman amid concerns patients let down by missing deliveries are repeatedly ignored.
In a highly unusual development, Darryn Gibson, the chief executive of Sciensus, has received a written warning from Rob Behrens, the parliamentary and health service ombudsman (PHSO). It says patients “should not be ignored” and must be “listened to and taken seriously” or he will consider taking further action.
The PHSO investigates complaints that have not been resolved by the NHS or by private providers of NHS care. Sciensus is the single largest provider of homecare medicines services to the NHS and has contracts worth millions of pounds.
In an email seen by the Guardian, Behrens told Gibson he had been unable to investigate most reports received about Sciensus because patients had not been able to complete the company’s complaints process. “That is not acceptable or fair to complainants,” Behrens wrote.
In a statement, Sciensus said it worked “very hard” to ensure NHS patients received their medicines on time. Its services had “a 95% satisfaction rating”, it added.
The move follows a Guardian investigation that exposed how Sciensus put NHS patients at risk of harm with delayed, missed or botched deliveries of medicines for conditions including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia and HIV.
It also uncovered how patients’ alarm at vital drugs and medical devices not arriving at their home was often compounded by a struggle to reach Sciensus to complain and fix the problems.
Source: The Guardian, 19 October 2023
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