Plain English Summary

The purpose of this project is to find out how important different factors are in influencing people to sue the NHS when things go wrong with patient care. We are surveying 1000 people from the general public using an online self-completed questionnaire.  In the survey we describe an imaginary incident in which an individual’s health was negatively affected as a result of the NHS healthcare they received. We give details about what happened after the incident and details about making a claim for compensation. We then ask these people whether they would choose to make a claim for financial compensation if they were in this situation, and repeat the question 9 times after we change some of the details about the incident and the claim. We will use statistical modelling to analyse the results of the survey. This will tell us how important the different details about the incident, what happened afterwards, and the claim process are for affecting whether people choose to make a claim. Information like this can help policy-makers to decide how to better manage NHS and patient relations following such incidents.