A report commissioned by the Department of Health (DH) has highlighted the significant costs of unsafe care – prompting the Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, to remind healthcare providers that ‘good care costs less’. At the same time, a report by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has found that many Trusts require improvement in patient safety.
Exploring the costs of unsafe care in the NHS, a report compiled by Frontier Economics on behalf of the DH, suggests that the cost of preventable (adverse) events is likely to be more than £1 billion per year, but could be as high as £2.5 bn annually. The report concludes that, although the NHS has made progress in reducing harm due to healthcareassociated infections, as well as some ‘safety thermometer’ harms, large sums of money are being wasted due to the cost of errors and preventable adverse events.
Exploring the costs of unsafe care in the NHS states that examples of costs range from around £5 m arising from drug medical errors to potentially up to £300 m cost arising from avoidable infections, following orthopaedic surgery. Timed with the publication of the report, Jeremy Hunt, The Secretary of State for Health, made a speech calling on providers to drive improvement and join the ‘Sign up to Safety’ campaign – with the aim of reducing harm.
Quoting Dr Gary Kaplan of Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle, the Secretary of State for Health commented that ‘the path to safer care is the same one as the path to lower cost’: “I want to challenge head on those who say that the future will be about cost and not quality,” he commented.
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