Income boost for defence organisation executives reported
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- Published: Wednesday, 31 August 2016 07:49
- Written by News Editor
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A report in the GP magazine Pulse says that the UK’s three medical defence organisations have raised salaries and benefits for their top executives by hundreds of thousands of pounds in the past three years amid spiralling medical and dental indemnity fees with some top earners having salaries ‘reach close to £1 million’ last year.
The hike in salaries for the organisations’ top executives comes as professionals struggle to pay for huge hikes in their indemnity bills, the report says. They saw fees increase by an average of 26% in 2015, with one in ten medics seeing their indemnity bill double in the period. NHS England said earlier this month that it would subsidise indemnity costs with a £60 million support scheme for doctors, which is set to launch in April 2017.
But an analysis of the organisations’ accounts by Pulse has revealed that pay packets of the top executives have been increasing while the fees have gone up. Pulse has found:
- MDU chief executive Dr Christine Tomkins earned £926,000 in 2015, including benefits, a 31% pay rise from £702,000 in 2014, compared with Stevens’s 2015 pay package of around £190,000.
- The Medical and Dental Defence Union of Scotland (MDDUS), paid its highest earning executive £786,000 in 2014, up 45% from £432,000 paid to the organisation’s CEO in 2013. Executive pay figures for 2015 are yet to be released.
- Meanwhile, Simon Kayll, chief executive of the Medical Protection Society (MPS), was paid £436,000 in 2015, up from £385,000 in 2014. Total director pay costs at the MPS increased by 35% from £994,000 to £1.34 million since 2012.
MPS chief executive Mr Kayll said: ‘As a large, complex international organisation, it is important that we benchmark the salaries of council, including the chief executive, against the market rate for their roles and we seek to pay at the median rate. The chief executive’s salary is around the lower quartile of the market group, which is based on a number of mutual, similar size organisations in the financial services sectors.’
Chris Kenny Chief Executive, Medical and Dental Defence Union of Scotland, wrote in a letter to a national newspaper: ‘Medical defence organisations rebut over three quarters of the claims that our members face without making any payment. The number of doctors receiving the most severe penalties at the General Medical Council has proportionately never been lower. What drives the increasing number of claims – and the resultant anxiety and organisational disruption for professionals – is a legal system which gives claimant solicitors every incentive to rack up costs and little or no incentive to select and prepare the most meritorious cases rapidly and effectively.
‘The Government has moved rather too slowly on its own welcome proposals on capping the level of legal costs that can be recovered in medical negligence cases. Nor has it pursued ideas for tort reform which have been on the table for some time. It’s time for action on these issues. The continued delay saps NHS resources and morale alike.’
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