A new Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman report shows the impact of public service failures and poor complaint handling in the NHS in England and UK government departments can have on the public.
The report contains a snapshot of complaints investigated between December 2014 and January 2015.
It includes the cases of three people whose deaths could have been avoided, nine asylum seekers who waited years for a decision on their application, multiple examples of inadequate end of life care and seven cases of poor care during pregnancy and maternity.
During the period of the report the Ombudsman made final decisions on a total of 556 complaints, of which 201 were upheld or partially upheld and 300 were not upheld.
The investigations into the avoidable deaths that feature in the report found that lives could possibly have been saved if doctors and nurses had taken more time to act in line with guidance and good practice, and if they had provided better care to their patients.
In one example of poor end of life care a woman in her twenties had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, but her palliative care was badly managed at a hospital in East Sussex. In particular, nursing staff did not respond quickly enough when she was distressed. She suffered unnecessary levels of pain and sickness at the end of her life as a result, which was also very upsetting for her family
Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman Julie Mellor, said; “Often people complain to us because they don’t want someone else to go through what they or their loved one went through. This report shows the types of unresolved complaints we receive and the human cost of that poor service and complaint handling. Many of the complaints that come to us should have been resolved by the organisation complained about. Complaints provide an opportunity for learning and improvements and should be embraced at all levels of the organisation from the Board to the frontline.”
Approximately 80% of its investigations are about the NHS in England and 20% are about UK government departments and their agencies. Almost half of all complaints about the NHS in England were about or partially about dissatisfaction in how complaints were handled.
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