WIREDGOV

To coincide with the publication of the Clwyd Hart review of Hospital Complaints, the Health Service Ombudsman has yesterday announced the initial impact of this year’s changes to the way the service operates.

Health Service Ombudsman Julie Mellor said:

“We believe our service has a significant contribution to make to improve the complaints system for patients, families and carers and for health service providers. Last year we listened to what customers were telling us, they wanted us to take on more investigations so that the public can be confident that there is somewhere independent to go for final judgement on their complaint.

“In April this year we changed our approach so that we can give more people this service. Investigating more complaints also means we share more learning and insight from them with service providers to enable them to learn and improve.

“We are now seeing the impact of this change. In the first six months of this financial year we have already taken on nearly three times more cases for investigation than in the whole of last year – 1,052 compared to 377. Since we changed our approach, we have already concluded more health cases than in the whole of last year – 344 since April compared to 300 in 2012/13.

“We hope more people will come to us in future. We expect to create capacity to investigate and resolve 3,000 health cases per year by the end of 2014/15 and more in the longer term.”