Stafford Hospital to pay £1m for errors

A health trust has been forced to pay out around £1 million in compensation to 97 families affected by the bad standards of care provided by Stafford Hospital.

Patients and their families are likely to receive payments up to £27,500, with the legal team for the victims saying the hospital failings left them feeling degraded and in some cases were similar to human rights' abuses.

Stafford Hospital "routinely neglected" patients and displayed "systemic failings" in its approach to care, according to an independent inquiry published in February.

Poor standards put patients at risk and between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected in a three-year period from 2005 to 2008. The inquiry found the trust had, meanwhile, become preoccupied with cost-cutting and targets.

Dozens of families will receive pay-outs, with sums ranging from £1,000 to about £27,500, with an average payment of just above £11,000.

Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust does not accept the lawyers view that there have been breaches of human rights.

Chief executive Antony Sumara today said: "As always, I offer our sincerest apologies to the families concerned, for the distress caused by the poor care their relatives received. We have made a lot of progress over the last year in improving the care and will continue to focus our efforts on building on these improvements."

He added: "We need to improve further our practices around prescribing and administering medicines so that we are more consistent across the trust, and we have developed action plans to address this.

"We have put in more ward sisters, as well as putting in 140 additional nurses. We have worked hard on achieving a high level of appraisals across the trust, with now over 90 per cent of staff having had appraisals." He said they had a plan to improve the complaints system by December.

But the trust, which also runs Cannock Chase Hospital, is still falling short on 11 key standards, according to the health watchdog.

The Care Quality Commission found it complied with just five out of the 16 objectives set out by law to maintain quality and safety.

While it had improved in some areas, the inspection report said on Friday that problems with the way hospitals handled medicine had increased in the last 12 months. The report warned services must continue to improve to meet the minimum standards of care.

The public inquiry into what went wrong at the hospital begins on Monday in Stafford.