BMJ  2008;336:795 (12 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.39545.597743.DB

News

Trusts need to improve their handling of complaints, commission says

Adrian O’Dowd

1 Margate

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The NHS in England is getting worse at responding to complaints, according to the largest measure of patients’ grievances, published this week.

The NHS watchdog, the Healthcare Commission, says that overall justified complaints from patients are rising and involve poor communications, hurried consultations with GPs, and a lack of basic nursing care.

The commission has published a report looking in detail at 10 366 complaints lodged between August 2006 and July 2007 and concludes that the NHS has a lot of work to do to improve the way it handles complaints.

The report says that numbers of complaints are small in the overall context of consultations—about 140 000 complaints out of 380 million treatments a year—but that performance still needs to improve.

The commission reviews cases in which the patient is unhappy with the first response to his or her complaint.

The report, the second of its kind, shows that . . . [Full text of this article]


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