Julie Mellor, speaks about the role of trust boards in ensuring lessons are learned from complaints
Boards of NHS trusts need to “grasp the nettle” and learn from complaints, says Julie Mellor. In her presentation at the annual conference of the Foundation Trust Network on 20 March 2013 she provided a unique perspective on complaint handling, based on cases investigated by the Health Service Ombudsman.
Highlights of her presentation
The three substantive issues that crop up regularly through the Ombudsman’s casework are about communication, care and treatment. Health organisations need to
- get better at listening to patients and their families and carers – particularly for patients with learning disabilities or dementia (Communication)
- improve the quality of care, particularly for vulnerable patients. Failure to feed and hydrate patients, failure to uphold their dignity and failure to safeguard their human rights are issues that we see over and over again (Care)
- make sure that patient care looks at the needs of the “whole person” in a holistic way, rather than just treating symptoms as isolated conditions (Treatment)
Examples of defensive complaint management include failure to share information openly, offering poor explanations, no acknowledgement of mistakes, attempts to cover up mistakes and falsify records, inadequate remedies and failure to learn from complaints.
Boards need to be accountable for ensuring standards of care and complaint handling. This should be an integral part of good governance. This means analysing trends in complaints received, scrutinising both remedial and preventive action as a result of learning from complaints and scrutinising action taken to improve patients and families experience of complaining.
Questions for the audience to consider included the value of accreditation of complaint handlers, the use of benchmarking data and board to board reviews.
