No FoI required

Sadly things can go wrong at hospital

One really positive thing about the Freedom of Information Act is how it has made organisations proactively release information.

I waste many an hour clicking down blind alleys on the internet in the hope of turning up an information gem.

One such organisation that publishes a lot of its material as a matter of course on the web is the National Health Service Litigation Authority (NHSLA).

This organisation has the unenviable job of paying out for medical negligence claims that occur within the NHS. It pays for these claims by billing NHS organisations, mainly hospital trusts, a premium for cover, and then it administers any payouts.

Therefore the NHSLA has a database that contains how much each Trust pays for cover as well as how much has been paid out in claims for that particular organisation.

All of this information is on openly available websites that anybody with an internet connection can click on to. Here are the most recently available figures. NHSLAFactsheet5201011.

From my local newspaper days it seems a crying shame that so few reporters have latched on to this organisation as the data can be used to provide some illuminating articles about the level of care provided by their local hospital.

I used the data this week for a story that appeared in the Sunday Express.

Sunday Express