What does our casework tell us?
There was an 8% rise in complaints from the public to us about the NHS this year. People come to us because they are unhappy with the responses they receive from the NHS.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that local resolution has got worse, it could be due to greater awareness about what we can do or better signposting from the NHS. Our experience in handling this volume of complaints and investigations, however, gives us a clear picture of what needs to improve.
This report highlights our concerns about communication with people who complain and the quality of complaint handling. It flags potential issues about complaint handling by GPs in their changing role and by the growing number of independent providers of NHS-funded services.
We also feature the challenges of complaint handling in the new NHS and we outline how we are working to support better complaint handling and more learning from complaints.
Complaints
We received more complaints about the quality of NHS complaint handling:
We received:
We investigated
50% more complaints about the NHS not acknowledging mistakes in care, (82, compared to 54 last year).
We upheld, in full or in part, 78% of those complaints.