A report by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman says that people who complain to the NHS are often denied the answers they need, leaving them no choice but to bring their complaints to the Ombudsman’s service.
The report contains 100 cases it has resolved, including complaints about avoidable deaths, GP out-of-hours care, delayed cancer diagnosis, poor hospital discharge and incorrect medicine dosage being given to patients.
In all 100 cases, people complained to the organisation locally first. But there was a failure to resolve the complaints locally, meaning that they had to seek the help of the Ombudsman service to get the answers they so desperately needed. Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman Julie Mellor said: “Too many complaints are coming to us which could have been resolved more quickly by the NHS. When people pluck up the courage to complain they are all too often met with defensive and
inadequate responses. Complaints need to be dealt with properly, so that people are given answers and to help prevent any failures from happening again.”
The report includes cases about:
- A family who were not given answers from a hospital after their 26-year-old daughter’s avoidable death. She was wrongly diagnosed with a hangover when in fact she had a life-threatening complication of diabetes.
- A woman who was wrongly denied funding for breast reconstruction after cancer treatment. She had to pay to have the treatment privately but after she complained to the Ombudsman service she got the money back.
- A man in his late 70s who had to bring his case to the Ombudsman service to get an apology from a hospital, after a nine-month-delay in his late wife being told she had advanced cancer.
