Hospital complaints go under microscope

Ombudsman Peter Tyndall will visit public hospitals as part of an investigation into how complaints are handled.

He wants people to share with him their experiences of making a complaint. Focus groups will also be held, and interviews with frontline and senior staff.

The Ombudsman said he was concerned that relatively few people complain when they are unhappy with the service they receive.

“Compared with other jurisdictions, complaints to the HSE and to my office are very low,” Mr Tyndall said yesterday.

Last year, the Ombudsman received 130 complaints about health care, whereas in Wales, with a smaller population, 682 were received.

“Complaints are a vital way of improving the quality of health services. If you don’t know what’s going wrong, you don’t know what you need to do to put it right,” he said.

Mr Tyndall said he would be examining hospitals’ complaint files, as well as speaking to members of the public.

He had viewed websites of some hospitals recently and while some were very clear about the process of making a complaint and had signposted his office and how to contact it, others were not clear at all and made no reference to his office.

Mr Tyndall said that around 900 people in the HSE are dealing with complaints and he believed that the number should be between 20 and 40.

He said people in the HSE were dealing with complaints as part of their job; they were not properly trained and sometimes compounded issues.

Mr Tyndall said it was unusual that, as Ombudsman for health, he was unable to deal with complaints about clinical judgement and was seeking to have the Ombudsman’s Act 2012 changed so that he could.

He said the Irish Medical Council was the body to deal with fitness-to-practice issues but the Ombudsman should be able to investigate any medical complaint. The current situation just led to confusion.

He added that the statutory complaints system in the health service did not allow the HSE to examine clinical judgements either.

Most of the health complaints he received were about general care and not specifically about diagnosis or treatment decisions.

He was concerned, however, that because there was a higher threshold for dealing with complaints about professional practice, some complaints might be falling out of the system.

Mr Tyndall said he hoped to publish his findings and conclusions from his investigations early next year.

People can share experiences with the Ombudsman at www.ombudsman.gov.ie; email [e-mail]; phone [phone]; or write by Free Post to Ombudsman, 18 Lr Leeson St, Freepost F5069, Dublin 2.