According to the latest official figures, the amount of compensation paid out by the NHS due to medication negligence has doubled in the last six years.
The NHS figures have revealed that in 2019/20, the health service spent £24.3 million on negligence claims relating to medication errors, a figure up from £12.8 million in 2013/14.
This means that in the past 15 years the health service has paid out almost £220 million on claims relating to these errors.
The negligence occurs when patients are given the wrong drugs, doses which are too high or low, or medicines which cause dangerous reactions. In some cases, patients have been given medication which was intended for another person entirely, sometimes with fatal consequences.
Previous research has suggested that medication errors may be killing up to 22,000 patients in England every year and other studies suggest that one in 12 prescriptions dispensed by the NHS involve a mistake in medication, dosage, or length of course.
Confusion often occurs when drugs are not labelled clearly, or when the packaging of different medications looks similar.
In September, health chiefs issued a safety alert following a string of incidents involving the dispensation of sodium nitrate, two of which led to the deaths of babies.
Officials claim recent increases in payments were due to changes in the way payouts were calculated, with total numbers of claims falling.
An NHS spokesperson said: “While serious medication errors are thankfully extremely rare in the context of the millions of patients treated per year, and the number of claims has fallen by a fifth over the last two years, a medicines safety programme has been established as part of the NHS Long Term Plan and nearly £80 million has been invested in electronic prescription technology, meaning more is being done than ever before to ensure safe medicine use.”
If you think you have suffered because of medical negligence. Please contact a member of our expert team, led by Sadaf Tariq, on 0115 824 1700 for free advice about making a claim.