BackA report has revealed that the top three reasons for hospital complaints investigated by the Ombudsman Service were poor communication, errors in diagnosis - including delays in diagnosis, misdiagnosis and failure to diagnose - and poor treatment. Other reasons for complaints in this period were staff attitude, no apology when things go wrong and unnecessary delay in treatment.
The report published by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman outlines how many complaints it has investigated for each of England’s 156 hospital trusts and the decisions we made on these complaints, in 2013-14 and the first half of this financial year.
For the first time ever the Ombudsman Service has published the number of enquiries and complaints it has investigated for each of England’s hospital trusts, alongside the number of written complaints the trust received locally published by the Health and Social Care Information Centre. This shows the number of complaints not resolved locally by the trust, which then go onto to be investigated by the Ombudsman Service. The report shows that some trusts are 15 times more likely to have a complaint about them investigated by the Ombudsman Service.
The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman is the final stage in the complaints process after people have complained to the NHS. It received 12,353 enquiries from complainants about hospital trusts over the 18 month period covered in the report.
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Source: Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman
