ADVERTISE YOUR EVENT FOR £50
Lewisham Letter logo
University Hospital Lewisham

PICTURED: The NHS has paid out £38million in damages over local negligence claims

EXCLUSIVE BY:

Matthew Dresch

NHS pays out £38M over testicle removal and other local blunders

The NHS paid out £38million in damages over the removal of a testicle and other medical negligence claims at Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust last year.

Some of the other injuries blamed on negligence included cosmetic disfigurement and amputation, our Freedom of Information request discovered.

Other pay-outs involved a “foreign body” being left in situ and “wrong site surgery”. 

The Lewisham Letter also discovered that earlier this month, the trust agreed to pay out another £9MILLION in damages to the family of a boy who filed a negligence case at the High Court.

Details about the case are shrouded in mystery but the Lewisham Letter understands huge pay-outs like this are almost always due to negligence during childbirth, with the baby suffering an injury that requires life-long care.

Guy Forster, vice president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL), told the Lewisham Letter: “Every penny of the NHS’s bill for compensating injured patients is because of negligence which should never have happened. 

“The most high-value claims are to compensate children who have suffered severe brain injuries at birth who need ongoing care, support, therapies, accommodation, and equipment for the rest of their lives. 

“They will never work or be able to look after themselves and can need round-the-clock care. While maternity and obstetrics cases represent just 11 per cent of clinical negligence claims handled by the NHS’s litigation arm, NHS Resolution, they account for 53 per cent of the overall spend on compensation. 

“This is the broad picture year after year. Both the financial cost and human suffering could be avoided if lessons were learned and the same catastrophic failures in care were not repeated.”

Related Stories:

  1. McDonald’s cracks down on Uber Eats ‘free food hunters’
  2. Hospital staff “horrified” as nurse gave out IVs without qualification
  3. Lewisham hospital “missed opportunities” to prevent dad’s suicide
  4. Lewisham ‘ghost town’ fears as new-builds sit empty for over a year
  5. Lewisham nurse “abducted” girl, 4, to Ghana without dad’s consent
  6. Lewisham Council under fire for blowing £5k on food at meeting

Our Freedom of Information request discovered that NHS Resolution paid out £38million in damages over 66 cases of clinical negligence at Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust last year.

Although the pay-outs were finalised last year, the actual incidents happened between 2003 and 2023.  

Most of the £38 million in damages went on childbirth cases, with obstetrics-related incidents accounting for £21 million in total.

NHS Resolution told us that the most expensive category of injuries at the trust that led to pay-outs was brain injuries. These accounted for £15 million of compensation payments.

The most common cause of injuries was a failure or a delay in diagnosis, with a failure or delay in treatment coming second. 

DO YOU WANT TO ADVERTISE WITH US? CLICK HERE

A spokesman for Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust said: “We look after over one million patients a year here at LGT and we always strive to deliver exceptional standards of care. 

“Like all healthcare providers, the work we do carries a level of risk and any complications are specific to each patient. Regrettably, instances of patient harm can still occur. 

“The Trust takes these instances extremely seriously – they are always investigated with the impact on the patient and their families at the forefront. 

“We take all necessary steps to mitigate the number of incidents resulting in harm, with patient safety at the heart of our approach.”

Related Stories:

  1. McDonald’s cracks down on Uber Eats ‘free food hunters’
  2. Hospital staff “horrified” as nurse gave out IVs without qualification
  3. Lewisham hospital “missed opportunities” to prevent dad’s suicide
  4. Lewisham ‘ghost town’ fears as new-builds sit empty for over a year