The Chief Medical Officer’s (CMO’s) report, Making Amends, has excited much interest from lawyers since it appeared last month. Some have seen it as foreseeing the end of clinical negligence litigation. But how much of an impact it will in fact have may turn out to be a question of resources.
One premise of the report is that the National Health Service should pay compensation in all cases where patients have suffered harm as a result of sub-standard care. The trouble is that there are rather a lot of these: according to research carried out some years ago, there are 850,000 cases a year in which patients suffer harm following an adverse event.
