Medical negligence compensation and body part consent

The donation of body parts after death can be a noble thing to do. It can aid the advancement of science, save lives and contribute to research. However, the choice to give your body over to science must be made by you or, in the case of children, the parents of the child. Taking body parts without permission is a serious exploitation, it can even be in conflict with a person's religious beliefs, and can result in payouts of medical negligence compensation.

It is estimated that there are some 40,000 body parts stored in hospitals throughout the UK. Most of these will have been received with proper consent. However, after a body part "harvesting" scandal at Liverpool's Alder Hey hospital, the government was forced to admit that around half of all hospitals may have been implicated in similar scandals.

The major issue here is one of consent. It can be traumatic for parents to discover that their offspring, whether they were stillborn or died in infancy, have been used, or in some cases even sold, by medical science. Such exploitation deprives parents of closure, and has even led to a number of affected parents becoming suicidal.

While medical negligence compensation will not make any material difference to the pain of these families, it at least represents some kind of justice and can help guard against similar mistakes being made in the future.

Alan Milburn, Secretary of State for Health until 2003, comments, "Consent must be based on discussion and dialogue, where consent is actively sought and positively given. The days have gone when the NHS can act as a secret society. It cannot keep patients in the dark. It has actively to seek the consent of relatives and actively earn the trust of patients. The NHS has to be open and honest in its dealings with the people it serves."

SRA governed lawyers representing clinical negligence claims in the UK
Suffering medical negligence can be a painful and traumatic process. Not only can we lose our health, savings and happiness, we can also lose our trust.

Claiming medical negligence compensation for the loss of these things will never actually make up for them, but it can help make a difference to our material lives and assist in empowering you to give yourself the best shot at getting back on the road to happiness.

The clinical negligence solicitors on our panel firms are among the UK's very finest medical negligence claim experts. They work to keep costs to a bare minimum, explain things in plain English, and pass 100 percent compensation on to every winning claimant.

All our solicitors are governed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, a branch of the Law Society.

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