Foreword
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As Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, I provide a service to the public by undertaking independent investigations into complaints that government departments, the National Health Service in England and a range of other public bodies in the UK have not acted properly or fairly, or have provided a poor service.
My Office has two key strategic objectives. The first is to help individuals who bring their complaints to my Office. I want to provide an independent, high quality and accessible complaint handling service that rights individual wrongs. The second key objective is to offer a wider public benefit. I consider it a fundamental part of my role to use the learning from my Office’s 40 years of handling large numbers of complaints to help drive improvements in the delivery of public services and to help inform public policy. In order to do this I am committed to sharing as widely as possible the learning from the complaints I receive and to doing more to tell public bodies in my jurisdiction, including the National Health Service, about the value of dealing with complaints promptly and effectively. I also recognise the importance of making potential complainants, and those who support them, aware of my role and what I can achieve for them. For these reasons, I am publishing these case summaries which are the second set in an ongoing new series of published summaries about complaints that I have investigated.
I have chosen these cases because they clearly illustrate good or poor practice in dealing with complaints from members of the public. In particular, the cases demonstrate how things might have been handled differently if the public body concerned had had in mind the Ombudsman’s three sets of Principles: Principles of Good Administration, Principles for Remedy and Principles of Good Complaint Handling.
These Principles are broad statements of what I believe bodies within the Ombudsman’s jurisdiction should be doing to deliver good administration and customer service, including offering remedy when things go wrong. The Principles cover:
- Getting it right
- Being customer focused
- Being open and accountable
- Acting fairly and proportionately
- Putting things right, and
- Seeking continuous improvement.
I fully appreciate that when public bodies deliver public services on a large scale, things will go wrong from time to time. What is key is how the public body then puts right the mistake. The Principles are not a checklist to be followed mechanically, but they do set out a framework for public bodies to have in mind. This will enable them to deliver a first class service to the public and offer the right approach to putting things right when they go wrong.
The Principles of Good Complaint Handling is the third in the series of Principles. They were published in November this year, and build on the Principles of Good Administration and Principles for Remedy. The Principles of Good Complaint Handling set out how public bodies should manage complaints properly so that customers’ concerns are addressed and dealt with appropriately. Complaint handling should be led from the top, focused on outcomes and accessible to the complainant. All too often I see cases where the complaint handling falls short of these entirely reasonable expectations. Mr S was left feeling frustrated and outraged following his experience with the Security Industry Authority, which sent his application form for a door supervisor’s licence to someone else. The Authority initially failed to explain their complaint process, failed to keep accurate records and did not put things right quickly and effectively.
In the case of Mrs Y, a GP Practice failed to act on a Consultant’s letter, and compounded that by not responding to Mrs Y’s complaint about that matter, having initially insisted that they had dealt with her complaint.
Complaints are also a valuable source of feedback for the public body. Handled well, they provide an opportunity for public bodies to improve both their service and their reputation. That means addressing individual complaints but also fixing underlying problems and using the feedback and learning to improve performance. Moreover, good complaint handling can save time and money and may result in fewer complaints.
The cases in this report come from a range of public bodies within my jurisdiction, including the National Health Service. They show the Principles in practice, for example what we mean by ‘Acting fairly and proportionately’, or by ‘Being open and accountable’. In the case of Mrs C’s complaint about continuing care funding for her friend, Mrs J, for example, we considered that the Trust and Strategic Health Authority had not acted fairly since their portrayal of health needs did not provide evidence of Mrs J’s healthcare needs drawn from all the available and relevant evidence; and had not been open or accountable since they had not clearly explained how the funding decision had been reached and what evidence had been used.
The Principles show what can happen when things go wrong and what can be done to prevent mistakes happening again in the future. The cases highlight where the Principles might have been used to good effect to improve the outcome for the complainant. I would like to emphasise that we have chosen these cases only to illustrate what we mean by the Principle concerned.
Many of the cases highlight where public bodies fail to put things right properly and do not take decisions based on all relevant considerations. When Jobcentre Plus suspended Mr K’s income support payments following a request from him to pay him by cheque, they left him without money for three weeks. They rightly considered the question of a financial remedy for Mr K, but then did not consider the full impact of their actions on him.
The three sets of Principles represent common sense and good practice but I hope they also go further than that, to drive a shared understanding about what makes for good administration and excellent service and complaint handling in public bodies and the National Health Service. I hope that using the case studies to illustrate the Principles will help prevent mistakes of the past being repeated and will encourage public bodies to use the Principles of Good Administration, Principles for Remedy and Principles of Good Complaint Handling to offer a better service to the public. Complainants often say that they hope that others will benefit from their complaint. I share that hope. This set of case summaries is intended to enable others to benefit from the learning from these individual complaints, as public bodies translate that learning into a better service for all.
Ann Abraham
Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman
December 2008
