Flawed complaints system leaves NHS patients suffering
HAVE you ever tried complaining about NHS treatment? I have. And let me tell you, it defeated me. I am (I hope you agree) an intelligent, savvy, experienced middle-aged man. But after months of paper-filling, obfuscation and bureaucracy, I simply gave up. I had better things to do with my life.
So it does not surprise me in the least that this week’s survey by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman did not just expose examples of appalling neglect but showed that many elderly patients and their families either don’t complain in the first place or – as I did – eventually just give up.
The report itself is deeply disturbing. Six hundred middle-aged adults with an elderly relative who had been treated on an NHS ward over the past year were asked about their relative’s care. The results shame the NHS.
Among the incidents reported was that of an elderly man who had to dial 999 from a hospital floor after falling over, because no one came to help. The repeated theme in the report is that elderly patients are “forgotten”, “ignored” and – in some cases – laughed at by nurses. But I am not going to deal with the incidents themselves today. Because the real lessons emerge from how those incidents are dealt with.
It is a truism of customer service that when things go wrong the test is how you respond. Given that this is healthcare we are talking about, one would hope that nothing should ever go wrong.
BUT in the real world there will always be problems whether through a simple mistake, tiredness, rudeness or downright incompetence. The test of the NHS, as of any organisation, is how it responds when something goes wrong.
The conclusion one has to draw, unfortunately, is that instead of learning from its mistakes, the NHS goes out of its way not just to sweep them under the carpet but to make sure they never come to light in the first place. One particular finding of the report is, in this context, especially striking. Forty per cent of those relatives who said they were worried about the care their elderly