Introduction
Welcome from our chair and chief executive
Welcome to our corporate strategy for the period of 2025–28, Resolution through collaboration, where we set our strategic priorities and aims for the next three years. The challenges faced by the health service are serious, with the costs of clinical negligence currently amounting to £5.1 billion annually1 against a background of constrained public finances. There is an imperative to re-engage and retain a skilled NHS workforce, to emphasise the importance of safe, high-quality care for all patients, to do everything possible to support a culture where staff are valued and where every patient’s voice is heard, ensuring there is a compassionate and open response when something goes wrong. Our aim throughout everything we do is to make outcomes better for patients and better for staff whilst ensuring we deliver value-for-money across all our services.
NHS Resolution has delivered reliable and comprehensive indemnity solutions for the NHS for 30 years, offering the best value for public funds and supporting open, compassionate care in which litigation (where required) is not seen as a barrier to transparency. Our services have grown to encompass advice on practitioner performance and resolving disputes between commissioners and providers of primary care. During this time, we have continued to develop our services to respond rapidly, when needed, to wider changes in the health and justice systems: for example, developing new schemes to support maternity and neonatal services, indemnity solutions to address workforce challenges in general practice and to support the pandemic response. Over the next three years, we will work with our sponsoring department to ensure that the indemnity schemes continue to act as an enabler for new models of care. To support the development and implementation of system-wide recommendations for improvement, we will work collaboratively with our partners, as anticipated in the NHS 10-year plan. In addition, we will need to continue responding to the financial challenge of rising compensation costs whilst building on the benefits of our digital and service transformation.
1 The cost of harm represents the cost of claims resulting from incidents from a specific financial year. For further information, please see 2023/24 Annual Report and Accounts (page 72).
2 Independent Investigation of the National Health Service in England.
Alongside the continued development of our systems and digital technologies, our innovative plans will move our dispute resolution work onto a permanent footing, capitalising on the shift of cases out of litigation as we handle more work in-house. We will use our new regional model to work more closely with the NHS to improve the system response to patients and families. Where necessary, we will continue to test and challenge cases in the courts, to provide clarity where the law is uncertain and to ensure that compensation payments from public funds are only made where they are due. Our new case management system will be delivered in 2025, enabling us to deliver our services in the most efficient way possible.
Over the next three years, we will continue to focus on supporting trusts to deliver safe, personalised and compassionate patient care with a specific focus on our work in maternity and neonatal care, recognising it remains an important area of concern for the NHS. We will drive forward our ambition to inform and incentivise work to prevent brain injury at birth and to ensure an effective and compassionate response for families affected by maternity and neonatal incidents with an enhanced approach to family engagement. In line with the recommendations of the Darzi Review2, we will call on evidence-based interventions and act on the conclusions of the evaluations of our Early Notification (EN) and Maternity Incentive Scheme (MIS).
Finally, our multi-year transformation programmes are expected to conclude within the lifespan of this strategy. As we move into the next phase of our strategic cycle, we will leverage the power of technology, data and artificial intelligence (AI) as part of our approach to continuous improvement across our services. We are grateful to our staff, our partners and our sponsoring department for supporting our ambitions over the coming three years.
