Healthwatch have put forward an action plan to an All Party Parliamentary Group on Health to improve the complaints system for patients.
This follows a new poll which reveals that, out of the UK, USA, Australia, France and Germany, UK citizens are the least likely to complain.
According to the survey, just 43% of UK patients complain following poor service – compared to 55% in the United States, 49% in France, 47% in Germany, and 45% in Australia.
The polling backs up previous data which indicates that an estimated half a million incidents of poor care went unreported last year alone.
Healthwatch England’s ‘Suffering in Silence’ report found that people find the complaints system complex and confusing and they often lack confidence that their complaint will be resolved.
In reponse to this, Chair of Healthwatch, Anna Bradley, has presented to the All Party Health Group a seven point action plan to help create a truly compassionate and responsive complaints system in England.
Anna said, “We have gathered a wealth of evidence highlighting what needs to change. It is clear there needs to be change that removes the barriers to complaining and ensure everyone has the opportunity to have their concerns heard and addressed.”
The 7 step action plan is as follows:
- Make it easier for everyone to complain – by giving one national organisation responsibility for providing patients and the public with improved information and education about how to raise concerns.
- Create a single, properly funded complaints advocacy service – provided under the Healthwatch banner which would provide users of both the NHS and social care with the same level of support wherever they live in the country.
- Drive up the quality of complaints handling – using the NHS constitution and complaints regulations to clearly set out people’s right to complain and what they should expect in response.
- Require every organisation involved in complaints handling to ensure people’s complaints reach the right destination – removing the burden currently placed on patients to pursue their complaint.
- Establish clear responsibility for capturing system-wide learning from complaints – identifying trends and ensuring national policy change properly addresses concerns.
- Make it mandatory for every complaint, regardless of how it is made or which service it is about, to be recorded and reported to the HSCIC – enabling the system to track progress through a national measure of consumer experience of the complaints process.
- Department of Health to conduct a review of the whole complaints landscape – consider simplification and streamlining of processes across the 70 plus organisations involved.
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