HTML Preview Patient Complaint Response Letter page number 1.
Customer Services: Information
An informal guide to
An informal guide toAn informal guide to
An informal guide to
: Writing complaint responses.
: Writing complaint responses.: Writing complaint responses.
: Writing complaint responses.
A Two-Way Process
As a service provider, when you receive a letter of complaint about your service, your first response may be
resentment or irritation. It’s only natural – nobody likes to be criticised, and having your labours faulted can
feel like a personal attack. It’s important to appreciate that all letters of complaint are feedback of the
patient’s personal experience of the service they have received.
They may be fully justified in complaining or sometimes their viewpoint may seem unreasonable – yet,
irrespective of our initial feelings, all complaints give us an insight into what our patients are thinking and
provide an opportunity to change the actual service if something is not working, or to provide appropriate
information to change public perception, if that’s the problem.
Under the NHS Complaints Regulations (2009), we should be providing a patient-focussed complaints
service. We should be:
• listening to what the complainants are saying
• responding to the issues they raise and
• improving our services subsequent to the lessons learnt from our investigations into their
concerns.
In the words of the Department of Heath (DH), we should be ‘Making Experiences Count’ and not just
paying lip service to a regulatory procedure. The DH guidance entitled ‘Listening, Responding, Improving: A
guide to better Customer Care’ can be found on the Customer Services’ page of Hampshire Community
Health Care’s (HCHC) intranet. It may provide you and your teams with some useful tips.
From receipt of the initial letter or phone call, one of the Customer Services team will contact the
complainant to discuss their complaint. The aim is to ensure that we understand exactly what the issues
are and what the complainant is seeking as an outcome, to negotiate a binding time-frame within which the
investigation and response should be completed, and to ensure that resolving a complaint can be a two
way process involving the patient, if that’s what they want.
The Customer Services team act to facilitate the best possible outcome to a complaint in terms of patient
satisfaction, and learning for the Trust. Customer Services will acknowledge each complaint, enter it on
Datix, seek any required consent, affirm any verbal complaints they receive and guide staff through the
investigation and response if needed. Ultimately, however, ownership of the complaint lies with the service
which has given rise to it.
The Dos and Don’ts of Complaint Responses
All letters of response should be written as befitting the Chief Executive of an NHS organisation – as that’s
who they will be coming from and who has ultimate responsibility for all complaints.
Letters of response should:
Advise who has investigated the issues, giving name and position.
Confirm what the issues are and provide a clear, open and honest answer to each one in turn.
Explain what happened and why, offer an apology, advise what lessons have been learnt and what
we are going to do about it (and possibly, by when).
Not use any medical jargon but if it is essential, then provide a layman’s explanation of what it
means.