Practice Complaints Procedure

If you have a complaint or concern about the services you have received from the doctors or any of the staff working in this practice, please let us know. We operate a practice complaints procedure as part of a NHS system for dealing with complaints. Our complaints procedure meets national criteria.

Your complaint will remain confidential to members of the Practice team and those we need to talk to for the process of resolving the complaint. Your complaint does not form part of your medical records and is kept separate from them.

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How to Complain

We hope that most problems can be sorted out easily and quickly, often at the time they arise and with the people concerned. If your problem cannot be sorted out in this way and you wish to make a complaint, we would like you to let us know as soon as possible – ideally, within a matter of days or at most a few weeks – because this will enable us to establish what happened more easily.

If it is not possible to do that, please let us have details of your complaint:

• within six months of the incident that caused the problem; or
• within six months of discovering that you have a problem, provided this is within 12 months of the incident.

Where at all possible all complaints should be addressed in writing to the Practice Manager, or using our complaint form (available on reception or our website).

When telling us about your concerns it will be of great help if you are as specific as possible about your complaint, by giving times, dates, places, people involved etc.

What We Will Do

We look to settle complaints as quickly as possible. We will acknowledge your complaint normally within five working days of receipt and aim to have looked in to the situation within the next three weeks. We will then be in a position to offer you an explanation.

When we look in to your complaint, we will aim to:

• Find out what happened and what went wrong;
• Make sure you receive an apology, where this is appropriate;
• Identify what we can do to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again.

In some cases we will not be able to gather all the information required within the three weeks, especially if this involves a locum/deputising doctor or temporary member of staff. In these cases we will offer an expected date by which we will reply fully to your complaint.

If your complaint is about clinical treatment your have received (or not) the complaint will be passed to a doctor or nurse who is able to make an appropriate clinical judgment and reply.

Complaining on Behalf of Someone Else

Please note that we keep strictly to the rules on medical confidentiality. If you are complaining on behalf of someone else, we have to know that you have their permission to do so. A note signed by the person concerned will be needed, unless they are incapable (because of illness) of providing this.

Complaining to others

We hope that, if you have a problem, you will use our practice complaints procedure. We believe this will give us the best chance of putting right whatever has gone wrong and an opportunity to improve our practice. However, if you are dissatisfied with the result of our investigation or our response, you have the right to contact NHS England, which is the commissioner of Primary Care Service to ask them to carry out an independent review of your complaint. You also have twelve months to contact the Ombudsman. Please also see other contact details on the back page.

Complaints Against Non Practice Staff or Procedures

If you are unhappy about the services you have received from organisations that are not directly linked to us, such as Health Visitors, District Nurses, Midwives, out of hours or any of the hospital services please make you complaint directly to them as they run their own separate complaints procedures.

Contact Details