The never-ending story of NHS complaint system reform

Sadly, the NHS has never been able to get its complaint system right, even after decades of trying. The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) (2020) has produced a report on complaint handling with a focus on the NHS. It spells out clearly the problems, challenges and opportunities to put things right. It is, however, another good report on NHS complaint handling in a long line of such—will this one will succeed where the others failed? The problems that beset NHS patient safety policies and strategies that I have regularly covered in my columns apply equally to NHS complaint handling—failures in leadership, a focus on financial rather than patient safety priorities, poor education and training in investigative techniques and management, and so on.

There is a long history of NHS reports into how complaints are handled and what needs to be done to make things better, but progress in effecting change has been slow. Clwyd and Hart (2013) in their seminal report gave a timeline of past reports, and how the problems have persisted since the mid-1990s. NHS complaints were also discussed in the Mid Staffordshire inquiry, which found that although there were many individual complaints providing ‘graphic proof that something was seriously wrong at the Trust’, the system they ended up in ‘failed to draw the necessary alarm signals from them, let alone the relevant lessons' (Francis, 2013: 245–246).