Medical Negligence in Dorchester — Dorset County Hospital & Winterbourne Hospital 
Care in this area is provided by both an NHS hospital—Dorset County Hospital—and a private provider—The Winterbourne Hospital.If you or a loved one experienced avoidable harm in Dorchester, you may be able to bring a medical negligence claim with the help of our expert medical negligence claim solicitors.
Victim of a medical mistake? Call our specialist medical negligence solicitors now on FREEPHONE 0800 1404544 – for FREE phone advice and a FREE first appointment.
NHS league tables September 2025 update – Dorset County Hospital gets an average rating
In the new NHS league tables published in September 2025, Dorset County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Dorset County Hospital in Dorchester, was ranked 48th out of 134 acute hospital trusts in England. This places it just above halfway nationally.
And given some of the serious medical since incidents at the hospital in recent years, that was welcome news
While the trust has not faced the most serious warnings, inspectors have pointed to ongoing pressures in emergency care and waiting times, which continue to affect patient safety and access to treatment.
For people in Dorchester, this mid-table result is a reminder that standards are mixed: many patients receive good care, but there are still risks of delays and mistakes. If your treatment at Dorset County Hospital has caused avoidable harm, you may have grounds to bring a medical negligence claim.
Dorset County Hospital: Recent Safety Profile and Case Highlights
Inspection and claims costs: Since 2019, NHS Resolution data shows that Dorset County Hospital (combined with University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust) has paid out over £5 million in compensation for surgical error claims, including incidents such as retained surgical items or wrong-site surgery.
In a particularly costly year, 2019–20, the hospital incurred £13.9 million in compensation claims—including damages and legal costs—a 63 % increase compared to the prior year.
Specialist clinical complaints: Recent headlines have highlighted issues in ophthalmology at Dorset County Hospital, with solicitors currently investigating claims on behalf of patients who experienced serious problems with eye care.
Together, these figures and investigations signal that, although rare compared with thousands of safe operations, surgical mistakes do occur—and when they do, they can result in life-altering consequences.
Winterbourne Hospital – Private Provider: CQC Ratings
The Winterbourne Hospital is a private facility in Dorchester run by Circle Health Group. It offers surgery, outpatient appointments, and diagnostic services. A Comprehensive Care Quality Commission inspection in June 2022 rated the hospital overall as “Requires improvement.”
The specific ratings were:
- Safe: Good (in surgery and diagnostic imaging); “Requires improvement” for outpatients
- Effective: Good (in surgical services)
- Caring: Good across all services
- Responsive: Good (though overall rated “Requires improvement”)
- Well-led: Requires improvement across the board
- Inspectors raised concerns about recruitment processes, record-keeping, and oversight in some areas, though they also praised staffing levels, infection control, compassionate care, and learning from safety incidents
MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE AT DORSET COUNTY HOSPITAL – NOT ISOLATED ERRORS
Dorchester’s Dorset County Hospital has quite a history of clinical errors. back in 2014, figures released by the NHS itself in April 2014, showed that a total of 76 medical negligence claims against that hospital alone had been settled since 2009.
Of those 76 successful claims, 17 of them involved errors with diagnosis, five with tests or test results and 26 mistakes made during surgery or other treatments or procedures. One sadly involved an infant fatality.
One boy was left in a wheelchair prior to his birth in 2002 and is due a very large payout, which wasn’t included in the £6 million figure released in 2014. When the figures were released, the hospital’s spokesperson was relentless in claiming that the figures were about average for a UK hospital and showed no remorse for the situation. A patient governor later stated that he had not been informed of the payouts and only found out after the Dorset Echo contacted him.
DORSET COUNTY HOSPITAL – THE POSITION IN 2016
2016 saw an update for the Dorchester hospital when theCare Quality Commission inspection ratings were published. Unfortunately it did not make good reading.
Death rates in hospital and up to 30 days after discharge were described as “ worse than expected”
The report went on to find that each of the following basic medical services provided at the hospital “requires recruitment
- A&E
- Outpatients
- Maternity and gynaecology
- End of life care
And in summarising the whole of the services provided by the hospital, improvement was also required with regard to issues of “safety” and “leadership”
That’s probably why historically, our medical negligence solicitors have always seen a sad and surprisingly high of medical negligence cases in Dorchester.
DORSET COUNTY HOSPITAL – THE DR FOSTER VERDICT
And the Care Quality Commission report seems to largely confirm the findings of another very comprehensive report earlier in the decade.
According to statistics from the highly respected Dr Foster Hospital Guide 2011 [the guide was produced annually by the Dr Foster unit at Imperial College in London – and was the best and most comprehensive independent benchmarking of hospital standards nationwide], the Dorset County Hospital in Dorchester is performing within the expected range for four key performance indicators. However, despite the fact that the results fall into the expected range, they are not as encouraging as the performance achieved by some other hospitals.
For example, for the SHMI result (which measures deaths following hospital treatment), Dorset County Hospital achieved a score of 103. This was by no means the highest, but when you consider that some hospitals were achieving significantly lower scores (such as 78), there is clearly still room for improvement.
The hospital scored 109 on the HSMR indicator, which is a measure of 56 conditions that account for 80% of deaths in hospital. Again, this was within the expected range but other trusts achieved lower scores – for instance, Cambridge University Hospitals scored a lower than expected 75.
One area where it seems Dorset County Hospital definitely needs to improve is in AAA surgery. AAA stands for Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm, and hospitals that perform the surgery infrequently can have up to 70% higher death rates than those who perform it often. As it carried out less than 35 procedures in 2010/11, the Dr Foster guide recommends that the trust either increases the number it carries out or ceases to perform the operation altogether. This is due to the fact that larger units have better survival rates.
Overall, it seems that while Dorset County Hospital is by no means the worst performing, there are still areas where it could definitely improve patient care – and that means there is a real risk of medical negligence in Dorchester and that’s where our specialist medical solicitors can help.
DORCHESTER MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE? CALL OUR SOLICITORS TODAY
If you think that you have been the victim of medical negligence at Dorset County Hospital, call or email our specialist medical negligence solicitors today. Home and hospital visits are available throughout Dorset.
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