The NHS Redress Bill: real reform or mere packaging?

Rosalind English is attached to the chambers of 1 Crown Office Row as an Academic Consultant. Email: mail@1cor.com

Concerns have been mounting over the years about the problems engendered by our tort-based system of medical compensation. We are seeing the rise and rise of a “compensation culture” and “US style litigation”; we are getting what we deserve: defensive medicine and spiralling costs to the NHS, which in 2004/5 spent more than half a billion pounds on clinical negligence claims alone. As early as 1978 the Pearson Commission, appointed to look into the shortcomings of the current clinical negligence system, declared that: “… the tort system is too costly, too cumbersome, too prone to delay and too capricious in its operation to be defensible.” (1) But nothing has changed since.