Hospital Negligence Compensation Calculator

Before you use a compensation calculator, you may want to know how compensation could be awarded for successful medical negligence claims. Hospital Negligence compensation can be awarded under two heads of loss:

General damages: awarded for physical and psychological harm.
Special damages: awarded for monetary losses caused by the harm you suffered.

When calculating compensation for medical negligence under general damages, those assigned this task can refer to the Judicial College Guidelines (JCG) in conjunction with your medical evidence.

The JCG contains guideline compensation amounts for various types of harm. While you can use the compensation calculator at the top of the screen, we have provided a few relevant JCG figures in the table below.

Compensation Table

Two important things to note regarding this table are that the top entry is not a JCG figure, and this information has been provided to act as guidance only.

Type of Harm	Severity	Guideline Compensation Amount	Notes
Multiple Instances of Very Serious Harm With Significant Special Damages	Very Severe	Up to £1,000,000 and above	Multiple instance of very severe harm as well significant financial losses such as lost pay, care costs and home modifications
Brain Damage	Very Severe (a)	£344,150 to £493,000	Very little response to environment, little to no language function, requiring full professional care.
	Moderate (b)(iii)	£52,550 to £110,720	Impact on concentration and memory, with a small epilepsy risk and reduced ability to work.
Kidney	Serious and Permanent Damage (a)	£206,730 to £256,780	The loss of or serious and permanent damage to both kidneys.
Female Reproductive System	Permanent Sexual Dysfunction (b)	£52,490 to £124,620	Likely permanent sexual dysfunction in a person with children or who would never had had them.
	Infertility without Aggravating Features (c)	£68,440 to £87,070	No sexual dysfunction or complications in a case of a young person without children.
Severe Leg Injuries	Severe (b)(ii)	£66,920 to £109,290	Injuries that cause permanent mobility issues such fractures that take years to heal.
	Severe (b)(iii)	£47,840 to £66,920	Serious comminuted or compound fractures, or joint or ligament damage resulting in extensive scarring and a lengthy treatment period.
Scarring to Other Parts of the Body	Noticeable Lacerations or Single Disfiguring Scar	£9,560 to £27,740	Either a single large and disfiguring scar or multiple noticeable lacerations to limbs, torso or hands.
	No Significant Internal Injury	In the region of £10,550	This award reflects an exploratory laparotomy where no significant internal injury has been found and the scar.

Can I Claim Special Damages In a Hospital Negligence Compensation Claim?

The second of the two heads of loss, special damages, is centred around reimbursement for financial losses resulting from the avoidable harm you experienced. Special damages not only reimburse immediate costs, but you can also receive ongoing payments for your future losses.

What this means is compensation paid out under special damages is often significantly higher than payouts under general damages.

Examples of costs you could be reimbursed for include:

Loss of earnings, including loss of future earnings, if the harm you sustained has impacted your ability to work long-term.
Medical expenses such as prescriptions, physiotherapy or other out-of-pocket bills.
Transport needs, so if you have been medically advised not to or are unable to drive, you could claim back the costs of public transport to and from work.
Home modifications such as an accessible shower, ramps or a stairlift.
Support in the home, including childcare, meal preparation or cleaning, if you cannot carry out these tasks safely on your own.

Remember, as with general damages, claiming special damages will require supporting evidence. Be sure to hold onto copies of your pay slips, invoices for care, prescription letters and other bills as proof of the costs you incurred.

This section is intended to act as guidance only. Since every medical negligence claim is assessed individually, we cannot make any guarantees regarding compensation payouts. For a more personalised idea of what your claim could be worth, see our hospital negligence compensation calculator or talk to our advisors for more information.

Can I Claim Hospital Negligence Compensation?

Medical negligence is where a medical professional fails to uphold their duty of care and causes their patient to experience avoidable harm. The medical professionals working in a hospital, from trainee doctors all the way to consultant surgeons, have a duty of care to provide medical care that meets the correct standard. This duty applies in both public and private healthcare settings.

While different medical professionals practice and specialise in different areas, the duty of care remains the same. As such, the general eligibility criteria to claim hospital negligence compensation will remain the same.

These eligibility criteria are:

You were owed a duty of care by a medical professional.
That medical professional failed to uphold this duty by not providing the correct standard of care.
As a result of this failure, you suffered avoidable harm.

“Avoidable harm” means any harm you sustained that would not have occurred had the correct standard been met. We’ll look at this in greater detail in the next section.

To find out more about this type of claim or to get a free assessment of your eligibility, talk to our advisory team today using the contact information given above.

What Is Hospital Negligence?

Hospital negligence is medical negligence that occurs in a hospital. This is, therefore, a very broad area encompassing many different types of medical malpractice. We have provided a few examples, but these are by no means the only circumstances that could constitute medical negligence.

Examples of situations where you could claim hospital negligence include:

Errors in your patient notes resulted in surgeons beginning a procedure on your left leg when they should have been operating on your right one. This error caused additional pain scarring as well as a worsening of the condition of your left leg.
Poor record management meant you were given the medication of another patient with the same surname. This wrong medication had a severe adverse reaction with your existing drugs.
Mistakes during childbirth resulted in experiencing a major birth injury, as well as significant damage to your child’s arm.
You attended hospital with clear symptoms of lung cancer. Despite this, you were not given further testing and instead misdiagnosed with a different condition. By the time you received the correct diagnosis, your condition had significantly worsened and the cancer had spread.

We wanted to give a broad overview of the types of medical negligence that could occur in hospitals. If we haven’t discussed your specific circumstances here, do not worry, you could very well still be eligible to claim.

To find out if you’re eligible to seek hospital negligence compensation, call us today using the number provided above.

Can I Claim Against A Private Healthcare Provider?

Yes you can. As we said above, all medical professionals, whether they are NHS staff, providing NHS services or wholly private practitioners, owe the same duty of care to their patients. Therefore, medical negligence claims can absolutely be made against private healthcare providers.

The only difference is the internal complaints process will be different depending on the provider, whereas all NHS hospitals follow the same complaints procedures. You can ask any questions about claiming against a private healthcare provider by speaking to our advisory team.

What Evidence Could Help Me Claim Compensation For Hospital Negligence?

Proving the correct standard of care was not provided will form a crucial aspect of your hospital negligence compensation claim. The proof you gather will serve two purposes:

Showing that the medical professional did not provide care at the correct standard.
Illustrating the extent of the avoidable caused and its effects on you. This will prove useful when solicitors are calculating a potential compensation figure.

Examples of evidence you could gather for your hospital negligence compensation claim include:

Medical records such as copies of scans, test results and other documents showing what care you received and how it failed to reach the correct standard. You can also provide records from additional treatments to correct or mitigate the avoidable harm.
Anyone who attended your hospital appointments with you could provide a witness statement. Take down their contact information so that these individuals can be interviewed during the claims process.
Prescription letters, medication packaging and labels will show what medications you were prescribed and in what quantities.
Any findings from the Bolam test (if used).

Will The Bolam Test Be Used In My Hospital Negligence Compensation Claim?

The Bolam test is utilised in some, but not all, medical negligence cases. The test involves a select panel of medical professionals from the relevant field assessing whether or not the care you received was of the correct standard.

This isn’t something you will need to worry about organising yourself. However, if used, the findings from the test will be very useful evidence for your claim.

Gathering evidence is one of the many things a specialist medical negligence solicitor from our expert panel could help you with. To find out if you’re eligible to claim, contact our advisory team today using the contact information given below.

How Long Do I Have To Claim Hospital Negligence Compensation?

Typically, a medical negligence claim will need to be made within 3 years as per the Limitation Act 1980. This may be counted from the date the sub-standard care took place, or from the date of knowledge (the date you would have been first expected to link the harm caused to the treatment given).

Now, there are cases where the standard limit is disapplied. These are:

Minors: if the harmed patient is under 18 at the time, the 3-year limit is paused until they turn 18.
Those lacking sufficient mental capacity: those who do not have the mental capacity to claim for themselves will have the time limit paused altogether.

In these scenarios, the court can appoint a parent, guardian or other suitable adult to act as the patient’s litigation friend. This means the adult can pursue the claim on their behalf and get the process underway much sooner.

You can inquire further regarding the time limits in medical negligence claims by speaking to our advisors today.

Can I Make A No Win No Fee Hospital Negligence Claim?

Once our advisors have assessed your eligibility and decided you have a valid claim, an experienced medical negligence solicitor from our panel of experts could offer you their services under a Conditional Fee Agreement (CFA). This is a type of No Win No Fee arrangement.

By instructing a trained legal representative under a CFA, you will benefit from the following:

Not having any fees to pay for the solicitor to begin working on the claim.
No fees for that work during the claim itself.
Lastly, if the claim is unsuccessful, you won’t be met with any fees.

Hospital negligence compensation will be awarded to you if the claim is a success. The solicitor will take a percentage as their success fee. However, as The Conditional Fee Agreements Order 2013 imposes a cap of 25% on these fees, you will keep most of whatever payout you are awarded.

To ask our advisors any questions or to get a free no-obligation assessment of your eligibility, reach out today via:

Phone on 0800 408 7826.
Contact us by filling in our callback form.
Click the live chat button on your screen now.

Learn More About How To Make A Medical Negligence Claim

You can view some of our other medical negligence claims guides on our website:

See our medical malpractice calculator here.
Find out more about starting a claim for wrongly prescribed quinine using this guide.
Read about pancreatic cancer misdiagnosis compensation claims and how that compensation can be calculated.

We have also provided these external resources for additional information:

You may be entitled to Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) after experiencing medical negligence. Learn more on the Government website.
Find out what constitutes good medical practice from the General Medical Council.
Learn more about the role of the Care Quality Commission here.

We’d like to thank you for reading our guide to claiming hospital negligence compensation. You can reach our advisors with questions or get a free assessment of your eligibility to claim by using the contact information given above.

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