What is the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme?
 

Negligence

• Imagine you go to the hospital with a really bad tummy ache. You see a doctor, let’s call him Dr Nick (“hi everybody!”) who asks you some questions about what you’ve eaten, where the pain is, how you’re pooping. Dr Nick owes you a specific duty of care, which is the first test for negligence, and his actions are compared to a theoretical group of doctors with the same training and experience as Dr Nick. 
• Imagine Dr Nick concludes you have constipation and sends you home with some laxatives and pain killers, but doesn’t examine you. If the imaginary group of doctors like yours would have examined you and found that you probably had appendicitis, and they would have admitted you for keyhole surgery to check your appendix, then Dr Nick has probably breached his duty of care to you.
• This does not mean that Dr Nick has been negligent. To be negligent, Dr Nick’s breach of duty must cause you to suffer harm. If your symptoms resolve and your appendix calms down naturally, Dr Nick has not caused you harm. If you walk from the examination into the hospital corridor, double over in pain, and are rushed to surgery where your appendix is removed, then Dr Nick did not cause you harm, as your appendix was going pop even if he’d rushed you straight to surgery.
• If, however, you go home, take the laxatives and painkillers, but your tummy pain gets worse; you're taken back to hospital by ambulance, where you are rushed to surgery, and your appendix is found to have ruptured; the surgeon needs to do open surgery instead of keyhole, which leaves a scar, and the burst appendix causes sepsis, and so you have to stay in hospital for a few days on antibiotics; this is where Dr Nick has caused you harm. As an appropriately trained doctor, your ruptured appendix was foreseeable if he discharged you, and he may therefore have been negligent, and you can bring a claim against him for that negligence.
  It’s worth noting that even in such situations, it’s not certain Dr Nick was negligent. His actions may have been reasonable, especially if he told you to keep an eye on your pain and come straight back to hospital if it got worse. If it was constipation, he saved you from unnecessary keyhole surgery because you'd been eating Biscuits Brown for a week.

Part of the intention in making the AFCS no fault is to avoid the legal complexity of a negligence claim, but still look after service personnel wounded while serving. That’s the aim, anyway.

So essentially negligence covers situations where someone is at fault for an injury. It is possible you may have grounds for a civil claim in negligence as well as your claim through the AFCS. If you are successful with both, though, you don’t get a higher level of compensation, as you can’t recover twice for the same injury, so the compensation would be merged. 

Two key differences are that in negligence the losing side pays the winning side’s legal costs, and the case management and the decision in negligence are overseen by impartial judges. These are really important aspect in the AFCS, which I’ll discuss elsewhere on the site.