Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer 11 March 2025 to Question 35836 on NHS: Negligence, how many instances of Obstetrics Clinical Negligence between financial years(a) 2019-20 and (b) 2023-24 resulted in the death of (i) the mother, (ii) the child or children and (iii) both.

NHS Resolution manages clinical negligence and other claims against the National Health Service in England. NHS Resolution does not record ethnicity data and therefore this information is not held in the format requested as it is not required for claims management purposes. NHS Resolution’s new case management system will collect the NHS number for claimants where possible, which will allow it to work with others to identify ethnicity and other protected characteristics in its data.

NHS Resolution has provided the attached information which shows: total payments for clinical negligence claims between 2019/20 and 2023/24 where the specialty is Obstetrics, broken down by year and patient age range at the time of the incident; the number of clinical negligence claims where payments have been made between 2019/20 and 2023/24 where the specialty is obstetrics, broken down by year and patient age range at the time of the incident, including interim and final payments; total payments for clinical negligence claims between 2019/20 and 2023/24 where the specialty is Obstetrics, and the injury 'Fatality' is present at any level, broken down by year; and the number of clinical negligence claims where payments have been made between 2019/20 and 2023/24 where the specialty is obstetrics and the injury 'Fatality' is present at any level, broken down by year.

NHS Resolution is unable to break down fatality by the requested mother/child split as it often receives claims from both the mother and child for the same incident. NHS Resolution’s coding of claims will only allow it to record fatality and does not distinguish who has died in those instances.