Tag: Hospital Complaints

NHS building

The Long and Winding Road of NHS Complaints System Reform

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By John Tingle

Sadly, the NHS (National Health Service) has not been able to get its complaint system right, even after decades of trying.

Despite several reports published over two and half decades detailing the challenges the complaint system faces, as well as potential solutions, it still is not fit for purpose. Most recently, the Parliamentary Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) has produced a report on complaint handling with a focus on the NHS. It is a good, hard-hitting report, which spells out clearly the problems, difficulties, and opportunities to put things right with NHS complaints.

It is, however, another good NHS complaint system reform report in a long line of others. The other reports failed to change adequately the NHS complaints culture and there is little evidence to suggest that this one will succeed where the others have failed.

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Improving the Mindset on NHS Complaint Handling

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By John Tingle

History has not served the NHS (National Health Service) complaints system well

History has not served the NHS complaints system well. There have been many reports about NHS complaints going back well over two and a half decades, saying the same or similar things about the system. Many have argued and continue to argue that the NHS complaints system needs to be much more responsive, simpler in operation and less defensive. It is fair comment to argue today that the NHS complaints system is still plagued with endemic and systemic problems. The NHS has never been able to gets its health care complaints system right.

Two contemporary reports, one published in 2018 and the other in 2020, give support to the view that the NHS needs to do much more to improve how patient complaints are handled. Read More

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Testing the Temperature of Patient Safety in the NHS

John Tingle Leave a comment

In terms of transparency and accountability the National Health Service ( NHS) in England is excellent at producing insightful, well-produced reports on health quality and patient safety. It does this on a regular basis and one of the great difficulties faced by NHS nurses and doctors today is the sheer volume of reports published. It’s an impossible task for nurses and doctors to keep up to date with all the reports published and to maintain heavy workloads in resource constrained environments. It’s also hard for health care staff to know which reports to prioritize and which are authoritative.

There is an urgent need for the NHS to create a one stop, patient safety information hub which collects reports from all NHS sites and other important global sites, putting everything into one accessible place. Some recent reports on written patient complaints have been published which are helpful in assessing, testing patient safety and health quality in the NHS. Read More