The Health Service Ombudsman, Dame Julia Mellor, has reported that “careless”, “insincere” and “unclear” communication has caused a surge in complaints against the NHS.
The report says that the NHS must improve the way it deals with patients who are unhappy with the treatment that they have received.
The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman is an independent body whose role is to consider complaints from the public that Government departments, a range of other public bodies in the UK and the NHS in England have not acted properly or fairly, or have provided a poor service.
In 2011-12, the Health Service Ombudsman received 16,337 complaints from the public about the NHS or NHS-funded services. This was an 8% increase on the previous year. Of the 16,337 complaints received, 4,399 were formal written complaints. The rest were not formal complaints or were simply seeking advice.
In particular, the report says that it received more complaints about the quality of NHS complaint handing:
- There was a 50% rise in incidents where the NHS did not acknowledge mistakes in care. 78% of these were upheld by the Ombudsman.
- There were 13% more complaints about the NHS providing inadequate responses to complaints.
- There was a 42% rise in complaints about inadequate remedies, for example, poor apologies.
Complaints about unfair removal of patients from GP lists have also continued to rise despite a warning about this practice from the Ombudsman last year and the report argues that concerns about how GP practices are handling complaints needs to be addressed as a priority.
Dame Mellor said:
“All too often the people who come to us for help are unhappy because of the careless communication, insincere apologies and unclear explanations they’ve received from the NHS. A poor response to a complaint can add to the problems of someone who is unwell, struggling to take care of others or grieving.
“The NHS needs to get better at listening to patients and their families and responding to their concerns.”
The Ombudsman says that where something has gone wrong, any apology should be frank and unqualified and should include an explanation of what went wrong and how it happened and that it is important that people at every level of the organisation ensure that they take patient complaints seriously and act on them appropriately.
Dr Peter Carter, General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing was reported as saying:
“This report shows that too often mistakes are compounded by the poor handling of complaints. Sometimes they’re simply ignored or dismissed, and other times the lessons are just not learned.”
Health Minister, Dr Dan Poulter, said that more stringent rules on complaints handling were being proposed under the new NHS constitution and that a new body, HealthWatch, was being introduced to represent patients within the NHS.
Patients have the right to complain if they are unhappy with their treatment, but it seems that not enough is being done by the NHS to resolve complaints at an early stage. This is bound to result in patients and families becoming more angered and distressed and therefore feeling that they have no choice but to take their complaint further.
The need for the NHS to listen to and learn from patient complaints is vital and the Ombudsman’s report clearly shows that this is an area that needs to be improved greatly.
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Danielle Young is an Associate in our Medical Negligence team.
If you have any questions in relation to the subjects discussed in this article, then please get in touch with Danielle or another member of the team in Derby, Leicester or Nottingham on 0800 024 1976 or via our online form.