Information request relating to complaints about GP surgeries and hospitals that have been investigated by the PHSO in the last five years
I write in response to your information request dated 9 January 2015 in which you asked:
"How many complaints directed at GPs' surgeries and hospitals have been investigated by the ombudsman in the last five years? What was the nature of these complaints? What was the outcome?"
Please see attached spreadsheet which contains the information requested. It may be helpful if I explain that hospitals in England are managed by Trusts. We record complaints about the Trusts responsible for the individual hospitals rather than the hospitals themselves.
I have therefore provided data for investigations about GP Practices, Acute Trusts, Mental Health Trusts and Primary Care Trusts (abolished in 2013) from 2009/10 onwards. Please be aware that not all of the complaints recorded about Trusts are necessarily about inpatient care provided in hospitals, they could involve a number of other issues such as funding or community care.
At the end of 2012 PHSO published a high level strategy setting out what we plan to achieve in the next five years (a copy of the strategy is available by clicking on this website). One of the aims of that strategy was to help more people by investigating more complaints, which we implemented on 2 April 2013.
Before 2 April 2013, PHSO did a lot of preliminary work on complaints before deciding whether or not to proceed to a full investigation. If we didn’t investigate a complaint, we could still provide answers and explanations and get good outcomes for people, but our decisions at this stage didn’t have the same impact as our statutory investigations. This meant that organisations weren’t necessarily getting a complete picture of all the complaints we had received about them and were potentially missing out on opportunities to improve services.
Now, with our new approach, if a complaint meets some basic criteria, we will usually begin an investigation straightaway. More people are receiving an independent, formal and final ruling on their complaint, and the NHS, UK government departments and other public organisations will get to see and learn from more of the complaints that come to us about them each year.
Therefore you will notice an increase on the spreadsheet in the number of complaints about Trusts and GP Practices from 2013/14. These figures are not necessarily comparable with previous years due to the increase in number of cases we formally investigated.
When a case is closed, caseworkers enter keywords onto our casework management system. I have provided details of the keywords recorded for complaints about Trusts and GP Practices. These keywords will give you a general idea of the nature of the complaints we received but will not necessarily provide a full understanding of the issues complained about, which can be complex and span a number of areas.
I hope that the explanation provided is helpful.
Yours sincerely
FOI/DP Officer
Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman