Labour’s Welsh NHS has spent £775million of taxpayer money on clinical negligence payouts in the last ten years, FoI data shared exclusively with GB News has revealed.
That’s enough to hire roughly 25,000 new nurses or 10,000 new GPs or fund the Welsh NHS for 24 days.
It comes after a harrowing report from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) found ‘corridor care’ was becoming ‘a daily routine’, with one Welsh nurse saying Welsh patients were being ‘stripped of their dignity every day’.
Helen Whyley, of RCN Wales, said there was a ‘crisis happening in our hospitals across Wales’ and warned patients will die because of the ‘falling standard of care’.
The crisis-ridden health service dished out £93million on negligence pay outs last year alone according to the data.
The Aneurin Bevan University Health Board- which covers South East Wales’ towns like Newport and Caerphilly- paid over £20million in compensation in 2023/24 for 86 different claims, more than any other health board.
Helen Fawcett, who lives in the health board’s area, said: “I dread falling ill. It is a constant fear.
“The Welsh NHS is in crisis. Sadly I have many family members in hospital experiencing horrible conditions.
“It’s not the fault of the staff. The Royal Gwent, the Heath and Nevill Hall (all local hospitals) are really grim. That’s if you can get past the waiting lists to get into them.
“I counted 16 ambulances waiting to unload patients outside one the other day. A few months ago my 103-year-old mother had to wait 13 hours for an ambulance following a fall with a broken hip.”
Claims made to the health boards include botched operations, diagnosis delays, failures to identify infection and treatment errors.
In recent years, this has included mistakenly fitting a woman with a contraceptive coil immediately after giving birth and amputating the wrong toe during surgery.
Both catastrophic errors occurred in the Betsi Cadwaladr health board in north Wales who have paid out £128million over the last ten years.
From 2014-2024, Cardiff and the Vale University Health Board shelled out the most taxpayer dosh of any board with an eye-watering £154million paid to failed patients.
Wales NHS Health Boards and how much taxpayer money they’ve paid out in clinical negligence over the last decade
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Map of Wales’ Health Boards
Wales NHS
Wales NHS Health Boards and how much taxpayer money they’ve paid out in clinical negligence last year
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Commenting on the FoI data, James Evans MS, Welsh Conservative Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care said: “People will be rightly shocked by this enormous sum accumulated under successive Welsh Labour Governments. Taxpayers, not Labour ministers, will have to foot this bill.
“After 26 years of Labour, the Welsh NHS is broken, with understaffed hospitals and overworked staff, resulting in a ballooning spending on clinical negligence payouts.
“Only the Welsh Conservatives can be trusted to fix Wales. We will bring forward the comprehensive workforce plan that our NHS needs.”
A Welsh Government spokesperson said: “Every year hundreds of thousands of people receive high-quality and safe healthcare in Wales.
“Everyone working in our NHS and everyone receiving care is encouraged to report any concerns or incidents so they can be investigated openly.
“Last month, we announced the Putting Things Right process for making a complaint about NHS services will be simplified and made easier. Our goal is to enable the NHS to respond quickly to feedback, learn from it, and continuously improve the quality of care.”
It comes after the Welsh NHS faced fierce criticism in recent months for hiring ‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Champions’ on eye-watering six figure salaries.
One job advertised by Public Health Wales sought a ‘DEI champion’ on £139,000 per year, enough to pay the salaries of five new nurses.
Despite record levels of funding, the NHS in Wales remains in crisis and performs worse than the English NHS in many key areas.
The average wait in Wales for hospital treatment after referral is 21.8 weeks compared to 14.9 in England, for example.
In Wales, 21 per cent of people on waiting lists wait over a year for treatment, compared to 4 per cent in England.
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Tory shadow Health Minister James Evans attacked Labour’s record on the NHS in Wales (Labour leader Eluned Morgan, right)
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It also comes after all seven health boards were found to be financially unsustainable last year, failing to break even over three years.
Adrian Crompton, auditor general at Audit Wales, said: “Whilst I recognise the scale of the financial and operational challenges faced by the NHS, I am concerned all seven Health Boards have failed to meet the statutory duty to break even over three years.
“The growing cumulative deficit for the NHS in Wales demonstrates that despite record levels of investment and higher than ever levels of savings, the statutory framework put in place by the Welsh Government to drive financial sustainability in the NHS is not working.
“Whilst there remains an urgent need for NHS bodies to continue to drive out cost inefficiencies in the way they work, this alone is unlikely to return the NHS to financial balance.”
NHS woes appear to be impacting Labour’s grip in Wales where they have ruled the devolved parliament since its foundation in 1999.
First Minister Eluned Morgan’s party has seen their poll lead eaten away, primarily by Reform, with one poll putting the parties equal on 31 seats each.
Welsh elections are due in May 2026. Nigel Farage has said it would be his ‘number one’ priority that year.
The Welsh government’s draft budget, published on December 10, 2024, includes £25.8billion of spending, almost half of which (£12billion) will be spent on health and social care.
The vast majority of that £12billion will be spent on ‘delivering core NHS services.’