Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord O’Shaughnessy on 13 March (HL5763), for which major disease burdens or procedures disease-level analysis is possible; and whether such disease-level analysis has been undertaken in the last 10 years.

The term ‘disease burdens’ is a term not recognised by the National Health Service Litigation Authority (NHS LA) in undertaking analysis of claims. The NHS LA claims management system records the cause of an incident notified as part of a claim and the injury which is the outcome of the incident. These ‘causes’ and ‘injuries’ form a list of codes on which it is possible to undertake analysis of the claims held in the claims management system. Sometimes the code relates to a group of conditions within a specialty, such as cardiovascular conditions, and therefore it is not always possible to undertake analysis at individual disease or procedure level. It should also be noted that claims can be multi-factoral and/or settled on a number of bases.

Due to the large amount of data in relation to the ‘cause’ and ‘injury’ codes used for clinical negligence in the NHS LA claims management system, a list is attached.

No disease-level analysis has been undertaken in the last ten years. The NHS LA is able to undertake analysis related to the causes and injuries described on the list attached.