Annual Reports
HC: The Healthcare Commission is urging NHS trusts to learn from patients’ complaints and improve complaints handling, with key proposals including apologising more often when they do make mistakes. A recent report shows that complaints about a lack of basic nursing care, poor communications, overly brisk GP consultations and a lack of help for mental health service users are among the key issues patients raise.
The Spotlight on Complaints report covers more than 10,000 complaints that were independently reviewed by the Commission between August 2006 and July 2007. Each year the NHS delivers 380 million treatments and receives around 140,000 complaints. The report, the second of its kind, looks at how complaints are handled and the common themes to enable trusts to learn lessons from them.
The Commission has recently published guidance to help NHS trusts improve complaints handling. Called The Complaints Toolkit – Handling Complaints in NHS, the guidance provides advice to NHS bodies and primary care providers on best practice in handling complaints at a local level.
Press release ~ Spotlight on Complaints report ~ 2007 report ~ Is anyone listening? A report on complaints handling in the NHS ~The Complaints Toolkit – Handling Complaints in NHS ~ NHS complaints procedure ~ Good practice ~ National Library for Health – Patient complaints
HC: The Healthcare Commission has published results from the annual survey of NHS staff, one of the largest staff surveys in the world. Between October and December last year a proportionate sample of staff were asked for their views & experiences of working for the NHS in England. Surveys were returned by 155,922 employees from all 391 NHS trusts – a response rate of 54%.
Anna Walker, the Commission’s Chief Executive, said:
“As one of the largest employers in the world, the NHS needs to be aware of and responsive to how staff are coping…………… Each trust is a unique working environment and local results highlight the challenges particular to each of them. At a national level, the survey results must be used to drive continual improvement in the working lives of thousands of NHS workers”.
Press release ~ National survey of NHS staff 2007~ National audit of violence in mental health services ~ BBC News: Violence costs NHS '£100m a year' ~ NHS Counter Fraud and Security Management Service ~ 'Clean, safe care' ~ DH - Healthcare associated infection ~ Clean-safe-care.nhs ~ NHS Infection Control Training Programme ~ DH cleaner hospitals website ~ Hospital Infection Society
