What we do
Our core role is to make final decisions on complaints that have not been resolved by the NHS in England, UK government departments and some other UK public organisations. Where we identify individual wrongs, we can get these put right for people.
Making recommendations
If we fully or partly uphold a complaint, we can make recommendations to the organisation to put things right. This could mean:
- acknowledging their mistakes
- apologising
- making a payment.
But the individual complaints that people bring to us can also help to make public services better for everyone.
If we find an organisation has got things wrong, we can ask it to show how it will prevent this happening again. This is so other people don’t go through the same thing. We publish summaries of some of these cases, so that all organisations can learn from the complaints we look into.
Sharing learning from complaints
The complaints we see give us a window into how the NHS and other public services are performing overall. We can see what is working well and what isn’t, and we can spot serious or repeated mistakes.
We share the lessons learned from our casework so that organisations can improve public services. We do this by:
- routinely publishing most of our casework (starting from April 2021)
- regularly publishing case summaries
- regularly publishing insight reports and laying these before parliament.
We also work with Parliament’s Select Committees and MPs to hold the Government and public services to account for delivering improvements.
Examples of our work
These are some examples of how our work has helped improve public services:
- Good complaint handling
- Improving eating disorder services
- Driving improvements in mental health care
- Acting on sepsis
- A safer NHS for mothers and babies
- Unlocking solutions in imaging
Get involved
To stay updated with our work to help improve public services, please follow us on Twitter @PHSOmbudsman.
You can also listen and subscribe to our Radio Omubdsman podcast on: SoundCloud | Spotify | iTunes
If you would like to find out more, please contact us at: publicaffairs@ombudsman.org.uk.