How have the strategic priorities developed?
NHS Resolution has released its 2026/27 Business Plan as part of the “Resolution through collaboration” (2025–2028) strategy, building on the three priority pillars established in its previous 2025/26 plan.
These priorities are Fair Resolution, Data and Insights, and Maternity and Neonatal Care. However, the operational focus has changed, with significant emphasis now placed on the increased use of AI and the in-house settlement of cases.
Fair resolution
As the first listed priority, ‘Fair Resolution’ emphasises the importance of minimising distress and costs by keeping both staff and patients out of litigation through indemnity schemes and by resolving cases more efficiently.
To achieve this, NHS Resolution intends to expand its dispute resolution options through mediation, resolution meetings and stocktakes, supported entirely by its own internal legal framework.
To improve efficiency, its pre-litigation service for low- and medium-value cases will be developed further, with particular emphasis on plans to maximise the use of AI as a tool for faster processing and case resolution.
Given that NHS Resolution manages thousands of claims each year, this represents a significant organisational shift.
Data and insights
To improve staff understanding of good practice, a model named “Compassionate Conversations Train the Trainer” is intended to be launched across trusts. The model teaches staff specific methods of compassionate communication. These are first taught by an expert to designated leaders, who then pass the techniques on to other staff. By distributing the training in this way, financial costs are kept to a minimum while information is still shared consistently. However, beyond the model’s underlying concept and method of delivery, discussion of specific communication techniques remains elusive.
The purpose of this model is to improve communication between practitioners and patients, allowing concerns to be resolved in a compassionate and professional manner.
Logistically, effective communication will ensure clear instructions and prevent dangerous misunderstandings among patients. With the Patients Association reporting that more than 55% of patients experienced poor communication from the NHS during the past five years, a programme designed to address this issue would both improve patient safety and reduce costs arising from medical negligence cases.
Maternity and neonatal care
As claims arising from maternity units are the most costly type of litigation, the final priority of the new plan focuses on reducing obstetric cases.
The proposal is to develop and improve the Early Notification and Maternity Incentive Schemes (MIS) by responding to data findings from previous years and working to deliver safe maternity care.
The publication of MIS evaluations of obstetric and maternity case data across the NHS, together with future targets, is described as a “mechanism of shared accountability”.
The Business Plan itself emphasises patient safety and aftercare, while wider evidence (including analyses published by the BMJ and other researchers) shows what is already widely known – that obstetric claims also account for a disproportionately large share of NHS negligence liabilities. Thus, reducing medical negligence in maternity units will significantly reduce costs for NHS trusts as well as hopefully reducing the number of human tragedies which we see as part of our work.
But will ‘intention’ translate into action?
According to the latest NHS Resolution Annual Report and Accounts, a record 84% of clinical negligence claims were resolved without formal court proceedings. This reflects a steady upward trajectory from 77% in 2021 and 80% in 2022, suggesting that alternative dispute resolution has become a more efficient method of operation. Collaboration between claimants and defendants to resolve case amicably has been an important feature of recent medical negligence practice but claimants and their advisors are ever wary of the inability to enforce deadlines should there be any slippage in a pre-litigation informal timetable. The rollout of a major new case management system, has caused short-term operational backlogs and has left some claimants waiting much longer than intended for their cases to be resolved.
While NHS Resolution’s 2026/27 Business Plan presents a strategy centred on early and in-house case resolution, increased AI use and obstetric patient safety, its success will ultimately depend on how effectively these intentions are translated into measurable and visible improvements across the NHS.
Written by work experience student India-Rae Harridge-Nutt, under step guidance of Medical negligence partner Sarah Stanton.
