PAUL CLARK argues that effective complaint management needs to be at the centre of the NHS’ strategy for improvement. He discusses whether lessons could be learnt from other sectors.
Following numerous public enquiries – including the publication of the Francis Report, the Keogh Review and Ann Clwyd’s Complaints Review – there has been a lot of encouraging noise that indicates the NHS may be ready to take a more proactive approach to its complaints handling. This commitment to reassessing how the NHS handles complaints is clearly a step in the right direction, yet it is important to remember that no other organisation operates on the same scale as the NHS, which has more than 1.7 million workers and deals with over 1 million patients every 36 hours.
As such, no other organisation has the same challenges in terms of monitoring, analysing and responding to multiple feedback channels across so many different entities. The crucial thing here is to be able to connect the dots between all these different touch points, rather than looking at all of this information on a Trust-by-Trust basis or limiting the scope of this activity to patients’ feedback alone.
There are actually a number of parallels that can be drawn between the financial and healthcare sectors in this regard, not least because both have suffered scandals that have eroded public trust and confidence. However, one area where financial services sector excels compared to healthcare is when it comes to complaint handling.
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