The Mackay Hospital and Health Service says it is always concerned when medical negligence leads to legal proceedings.
Queensland Treasury figures show the service has paid more than $10 million in medical negligence settlement payments in the past three financial years.
It includes more than $8 million paid for five claims in the 2011-’12 financial year.
The executive director of clinical services, Dr David Farlow, says claims are usually paid years after the incidents occur.
“You would expect sort of 2013-’14 as a lower end, because any significant medico-legal does take a number of years,” he said.
“So really all this is paying is 2011-’12, those number of claims were settled, but when they occurred could have been many, many years ago.”
The health service says the number of medical negligence settlements it pays is small compared to how many patients it sees.
Dr Farlow says systems are in place to investigate and fix errors to reduce the risk of them reoccurring.
“Whilst I’d love to be able to say we make no errors, whilst we have humans there will be errors but I can assure the community we have really quite robust safety systems in place,” he said.
“In fact, we’ve only just finished ACHS [The Australian Council on Healthcare Standards], which is an accreditation process. We’re waiting on the formal report but our informal report feedback is that we passed that with flying colours.”