Patients afraid to complain about health care: report
Patient ombudsman says 70% of complaints are related to hospitals
Many patients, their families and caregivers worry filing a complaint about their health care could lead to reprisal, says Ontario’s patient ombudsman, and there is still work to do to combat that perception.
In her first annual report, which will be released Thursday, patient ombudsman Christine Elliott says her office received approximately 2,000 complaints from patients, their families and caregivers between 2016 and 2017. But many of those same people also expressed reservations about lodging the complaint.
“There is that fear of reprisal on the part of some people that if they make a complaint or speak out, that the care of their loved one will suffer,” she says. “I’ve told people I consider that very unlikely to happen, but I can’t guarantee that it won’t.”
In the report — called “Fearless: Listening, Learning, Leading” — Elliott encourages patients and their families to continue to come forward to her office with their concerns. She also asks hospitals, home-care agencies and long-term-care homes to embrace the complaints process, which she says will lead to improvements in Ontario’s health-care system.
“People are making these complaints for the right reasons,” she says. “They want assistance with their own complaint, but they also want to make the system better, too.”
The Ontario government created the Patient Ombudsman office in 2014 and the agency took its first complaint in July 2016. Elliott said in its first year of operation, her office resolved 70 per cent of complaints, but consistent themes also emerged in the messages from patients and their families.
The report says that majority of the complaints fielded by the office, 70 per cent, related to Ontario’s hospitals; 20 per cent related to home care and 10 per cent were related to long-term care.
The top five issues flagged to the ombudsman were inappropriate discharge, miscommunication or lack of communication, difficulty accessing service, poor care, and understanding and improving policies and procedures.
Elliott said about two-thirds of complaints involve some element of a breakdown in communications. Health-care agencies need to continue to work toward a “patient-first” approach, which relieves the anxiety people often feel when they’re receiving care.