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The problem of whiplash in car insurance05 Dec 2011The UK has the highest number of car insurance whiplash claims in Europe. This high rate has much to do with the ease with which such claims can be brought at no financial risk to the claimant and the effectiveness of claims management companies and injury lawyers at encouraging accident victims to bring them. Whiplash is not one medical condition, but a range of neck injuries caused by sudden acceleration and deceleration of the neck. The best known classification of the severity of injury was published by the Quebec Task Force more than ten years ago, graded as follows:
As the above grading shows, except in very severe cases where there would be 'hard' clinical signs of injury, the doctor has to rely on 'soft' signs and symptoms that the patient can easily manipulate. Injury lawyers, of course, get to know the various approaches of their panel of medical experts, most of them orthopaedic surgeons, and learn to match their medical experts to specific clients to maximum effect. While, presumably, most of these cases are genuine and the degree of symptomatology is fairly presented; a porportion will be exaggerated or fictitious and it is that group, which insurers believe to be sizeable, that needs to be addressed. It has been suggested that the rules of evidence should be changed (including by Jack Straw in his Motor Insurance Regulation Bill) so that the presence of symptomatic whiplash-related injury has to be objectively demonstrated as an alternative to the current situation whereby unless a liable car insurance company can prove its absence, compensation must be paid as, in practice, whiplash injury is deemed to be present if supported by a medical expert's report that declares the claimant symptomatic. While this change probably would make it slightly harder for the have-a-go fraudster to make a successsful claim, in reality, little changes if the claim is medically backed up. Thatcham, the car insurance industry-funded research unit, has developed a Whiplash Injury Toolkit (WITKit) designed to help to identify those cases unlikely to be genuine but it needs further development before it will be of much use in individual cases. In our report Tackling the High Cost of Car Insurance - Strategic Review, we have suggested that Thatcham might usefully fund a medically-led research programme to review current international research evidence (there's a lot of it) and undertake new research on whiplash victims as appropriate, particularly in the light of evolving modern investigative techniques, with a view to developing more rigorous assessement protocols that would assist clinicians to more accurately diagnose it. It is, of course, a hard task to tighten up on diagnosis, a task that has proved impossible when other researchers have investigated it. It also has to be said that historically industry-funded whiplash research that has not been helpful to the industry has been suppresed. Nonetheless, the UK leads the way internationally in its scientific rigour when conducting meta-analyses of this nature as well as in the conduct of this kind of research; so there is every reason to suppose that if there are to be any useful developments in this area that they could indeed come from suitably funded UK research. Given the high cost of settling whiplash claims in the UK, it is logical, although not ideal in view of their vested interest, that this funding should come from the insurance industry itself. It has to be said that there is a lot of misundersanding in relation to what can realistically be done about whiplash for the reasons we review in a separate article: The complexities of whiplash. For anyone keen to keep down insurance costs that are inflated by excessive whiplash claims, you can compare car insurance companies and brokers below. |
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