NHS Paid Out £101m Over Maternity Failings At Nottingham Hospitals

The BBC has reported that maternity failings at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) have cost tens of millions of pounds in compensation payments and legal fees.

Medical negligence resulted in injury and death

The Trust is currently the subject of the UK’s largest-ever maternity review, with hundreds of baby deaths and injuries being examined.

It has now been reported that between 2006 and 2023, £101 million was paid in claims against NUH. This related to 134 cases regarding failings in maternity services at NUH. The majority of this figure (£85m) was damages for families who were successful in proving their baby’s death or injury was a result of medical negligence.

Experts have said that lives could have been saved if the Trust invested more in learning from its mistakes.

Types of injury

More than half of the payouts in Nottingham’s maternity cases covered costs for babies born with cerebral palsy due to medical failings.

In such cases, these babies will have had significant injuries and likely require life-long care provisions, equipment, and medication.

These cases against NUH amounted to £53.1m in the last 17 years.

Stillbirth was the second highest figure at £4.6m, followed by successful claims of bowel damage (£3.4m), bladder damage (£2.2m), and fatality (£1.9m).

A major problem

These figures relate to successful claims against NUH for maternity service failures. This shows the extent of the problem within the Trust’s maternity services and seems to show that not enough is being done to learn from mistakes.

Experts are now calling for more to be done to tackle the cause of medical errors and reduce the number of issues that lead to patients rightly seeking redress and compensation.

Hundreds of successful claims against one Trust’s maternity services show a grave problem that must be addressed and resolved.

It was already clear that NUH’s maternity services are failing further due to the intense scrutiny of the major review currently taking place under senior midwife Donna Ockenden.

1,800 families are now involved in the review and Nottinghamshire Police announced last year that it would also be investigating maternity practices at the Trust.

Whilst it is perhaps inevitable that mistakes and errors will happen in medical treatment from time to time, the extent of the problem at NUH is far from the norm and seems to illustrate a real lack of learning from previous experiences.

Ultimately, this is going to continue to impact confidence in maternity services at NUH and there is clearly a mountain to climb to resolve this. Families should not have to be concerned about their treatment and safety when they walk in the doors of a hospital under NUH control, but sadly this seems to be the inevitable consequence of the continued reports of devastating failures.