Professor John Robertson OBA

Many thanks to stewartb for alerting us to this and for the opening words in the headline above.

NOTE - I'm unsure of how to compare the far more numerous but different claims in Sweden, Denmark or Finland, so have not.

The above table is from the UK National Audit Office‘s report Costs of clinical negligence, published on 17 October 2025. The explanatory notes for how it was put together are at the bottom of this.

It makes incredible reading, to put it mildly.

Start with the fourth column – number of claims per year – and note the huge number of claims made per year against NHS England and to a lesser extent, Ireland –

• NHS England has 40 times as many as in Scotland yet with only 10 to 11 times the population, thus 4 times the rate.
• NHS England has more claims than the USA yet the latter has 8 times the population.
• Ireland has the same population as Scotland but twice as many claims.

In the seventh and right-hand column – cost per capita (head of population)- see the massive cost per head of population for England and Ireland, nearly eight and six times higher than in Scotland.

What explains these differences? If they were the other way round, ‘our’ media and opposition parties would claim failures of clinical practice in NHS Scotland and, of course, funding and leadership failures by the SNP Government, so it must be because together NHS Scotland the SNP, after 18 years, have produced one of the best health services in the world.

Source:

https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/costs-of-clinical-negligence-report.pdf

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