Learning from Claims Data: A Systems Approach to Improving Patient Safety
Claims data can be seen as too old to be useful. But when triangulated with incidents and complaints, it becomes a powerful rear-view mirror that reveals whether the same themes are still recurring years later. In this session from the Connected Health & Care Summit 2026, Nick Rigg, Senior Programme Lead for Maternity Schemes Evaluation and Implementation, and Naomi Assame, Deputy Director of Safety and Learning at NHS Resolution, explain how claims data can support learning and how a neonatal jaundice case study demonstrates the value of looking at harm through a systems lens.
Watch NHS Resolution explain how claims data, maternity incentive schemes and SEIPS-based case studies are being used to learn from harm and drive improvement across the NHS.
What the session covers and the key messages
This session introduces NHS Resolution’s role, its data, and how the safety and learning team uses both quantitative and qualitative information to support improvement. The key messages were:
- NHS Resolution holds over 30 years of claims data. This year, approximately 14,200 claims were notified across all schemes, a very small proportion of total healthcare episodes
- The primary motivation for people making a claim is not financial. It is wanting to prevent the same harm to happen to someone else
- Saying sorry is never an admission of liability. NHS Resolution has never held back paying on a claim because someone apologised
- The Maternity Incentive Scheme has been simplified for year eight, reducing 10 safety actions to six with the aim of , reducing complexity and demands on resource, with a shift toward using outcome-driven measures and greater local flexibility
- A neonatal jaundice case study, created at the request of affected families during a mediation, demonstrates how SEIPS analysis reveals system-level factors that a blame-focused approach would miss
