Healthcare Commission reports NHS complaints show serious safety fears.

NHS complaints show serious safety fears

Extract:

"More than one in five complaints referred to the health watchdog involves serious concerns about patient safety in the NHS, according to a report out today.

Hospitals, family doctors and dentists all have lessons to learn from more than 16,000 complaints reflecting the “raw feelings of patients”, the Healthcare Commission said.

About 100,000 complaints are made against the health service every year and 8,000 are sent for the commission to review if a patient is dissatisfied with the outcome. The number of complaints sent have trebled since the watchdog took on the role in 2004. In the first report of its kind, the commission says that 22 per cent of complaints it had handled over two years were about safety, such as accidents, falls or children being given the wrong injections.

Others concerned the poor care of dying relatives, bereaved families being treated in an abrasive or unsympathetic manner, and patients being discharged at inappropriate times of day. Poor quality meals, inadequate nursing care and dirty wards were also high on the list of complaints.

The commission said that many concerns focused on the “basic elements of healthcare”. It is now publishing a list of the worst ten NHS trusts for dealing with complaints that should have been resolved at a local level. "

I suggest that people interested in how complaints are dealt with visit the http://www.avma.org.uk/index.asp website (Action against medical accidents). You'll need to register, I think, and log in, then click on 'Share experience' in the links on the left and go to the forums. - I suggest you will gain there a better and more insightful idea of the atrocious way many patients are treated in the NHS and you will see that, in the main, nothing at all is done about it!

See also The appalling way Andrea Carey has been treated by our "caring professions" and how NOTHING AT ALL has been done to help her! - The main purpose of a Complaints Procedure should be to take the complaint seriously and help the complainant as much as possible. - This is NOT what happens with the NHS complaints! Readers of this blog may like to write to the Healthcare Commission about Andrea Carey and try to get somebody to help her.

I see that Blair calls British doctors 'the best in Europe'

I don't share his opinion...)o: