Our organisation performs an important role in our democracy, providing a voice to users of public services who have experienced failures or injustices.
Over the last year, it has been a great honour to lead the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) as the interim Ombudsman. It is a privilege to be at an incredible organisation that has an important public service mission, with a talented and motivated team that are committed to public service improvements.
This document sets out our strategy for the next year and sits alongside our business plan, which contains further details on how we will deliver it. It is purposefully not a long-term strategy. That will follow next year once the permanent Ombudsman has been appointed.
In the development of this strategy, we have set out to achieve a few key principles. They are continuity in our overall approach, to consolidate and simplify our overall framework and, most importantly, to complete the journey that we started in 2022.
The development of a new strategy provides an opportunity to look back at what has been achieved by the organisation over the last few years. In 2022 we set out an ambitious plan with three objectives and we have made substantial progress against each one. This included:
- introducing our flagship NHS and Government Complaint Standards
- major investigations such as the communication of changes to women’s State Pension age
- securing compensation for victims of the Windrush scandal and changes to the compensation scheme
- establishing our Public Engagement Advisory Group to bring the voice of users into the design and delivery of our service.
We have used our evidence base to highlight issues in patient safety and care, including producing reports on failures in maternity care, sepsis diagnosis and imaging. We have also used our media profile to push for changes in the NHS and improvements in public services.
We have also faced some significant challenges. Like other ombudsman schemes in the UK, we have seen an unprecedented increase in the demand for our service. The number of complaints we receive about NHS services has almost doubled over the last decade. Our 20% improvement in efficiency has been vital in our efforts to keep pace with demand.
All public services face significant pressures and tough financial constraints that will likely produce even greater demands on PHSO. We need to have an organisational model that can respond to increases in demand and help focus our resources on the issues where we can deliver the most impact. This year we will introduce a major change to our operating model, the Public Value Model, that will better support us to respond to increases in demand.
Our service will always be available to everyone who needs it most. It will continue to be our objective to open up access to our service and remove any barriers. We need to be user-focused in how we deliver our service and use technology wherever possible. Society rightly expects more from public services, including that their voices are heard in the way that services are designed and operate.
We need to deliver impact from our casework for individual complainants and organisations that we investigate. The vast majority of people who come to us want an apology from the organisation they are complaining about and for the organisation to act to make sure others do not experience the same mistakes.
To achieve this, we need a shift from being reactive to demand to being proactive and focused on delivering impact in the most important areas. In future we want to undertake more systemic investigations and we will set out publicly a small number of priority themes or areas of focus.
This one-year strategy will lay the foundations for a more effective service for people and organisations, and ultimately achieve our objective of supporting public service improvements. It will lead to a different-looking PHSO in future years and I look forward to the journey ahead.
Rebecca Hilsenrath,
Chief Executive Officer