Review says investigations into NHS complaints inadequate

According to a review by the office of the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman Service, nearly half of investigations into NHS patient complaints are inadequate.

The review, which looked into 150 cases of alleged avoidable death or harm, found that the handling of 61complaints of NHS trusts in England was not good enough, and that 28 of the cases should have been investigated as a serious incident.

In addition to statements and records, the review looked into the quality of evidence relied on and investigations.

Ombudsman Dame Julie Mellor said “When people make a complaint that they have been seriously harmed, they should expect it to be taken seriously and thoroughly investigated.

“The NHS must tackle the variation in the quality of its investigations but also needs to recognise when to initiate an investigation.

“When the NHS makes a mistake their duty is to investigate – these investigations shouldn’t be about attributing blame but should find out what happened and why in order to prevent the same mistakes from happening again. Our evidence too often shows this is not the case.”

Former NHS trust chairman Roy Lilley, said that he had long believed that the NHS complaints procedures were inadequate.

“The trust is absolutely the wrong person to investigate this because the trust is investigating the trust, it should be done independently and outside the purview of that organisation,” he said.

“I don’t think the numbers are sufficiently robust, but I do think that they confirm the concerns that a lot of people have about how the NHS deals with complaints.”

The Department of Health have said that it would be putting in place measures to reduce avoidable harm and death shortly.

It said it had already introduced a new CQC inspection procedure and recruited over 21,000 more clinical staff into hospitals in the last five years.

“We’ve set out the ambition to make the NHS the safest healthcare system in the world and we know that listening to patients and staff is absolutely vital to improving care.

“That’s why we’ve made hospitals legally obliged to apologise to patients when mistakes do happen and asked Robert Francis (who chaired the public enquiry into the Stafford hospital deaths) to produce an independent report on how to create a more open NHS culture.”

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Posted by Tony May, Partner/head of Clinical Negligence Department, Chadwick Lawrence LLP (tonymay@chadlaw.co.uk ), Medical negligence lawyers and clinical negligence solicitors in Huddersfield, Leeds, Wakefield and Halifax, West Yorkshire.

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