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COMMENTS/COMPLAINTS/SUGGESTIONS
We endeavour to give you the best service possible at all times but there may be occasions when you wish to express dissatisfaction. We offer an informal, in-house procedure to deal with your concerns. In addition, we have an approved formal complaints procedure as part of the NHS system, which allows patients to comment, make suggestions or complain about the service they receive. The procedure does not deal with legal liability or compensation and does not affect your right to complain to Coventry Primary Care Trust or ICAS (Independent Complaints Advocacy Service Tel: 0845 337 3056).
ICAS is an independent, impartial, non-judgmental and confidential service for anyone needing help or advice regarding a complaint about NHS treatment. They collaborate closely with The Patient Advice & Liaison Service (PALS).
PALS provide confidential advice and support to patients, families and their carers. It also gives assistance in resolving problems and concerns quickly. FREEPHONE Patient Advice and Liaison Services (PALS) Tel: 0800 137 799. Information about local health services is also available (024 7624 6002).
If you wish to make a complaint please contact the Practice Management by telephone or in writing by mail or email. You will receive an acknowledgment within 2 days. An appointment to discuss the complaint in detail will be made within ten days. You may bring a friend or relative with you to the meeting. Please note that due to confidentiality protocol we need your written consent for a third party to complain on your behalf.
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Not Satisfied with Advice from your GP or practice Nurse?
Patients or relatives sometimes contact us for help because of anxieties about the advice or treatment that they have been given by their GP or by a Nurse.
Most problems between patients and their doctors are not about bad advice or treatment but about bad communication. This is becoming an increasingly difficult problem for clinicians (GP's, Nurses and Specialists) because they are being asked to see more and more patients. There is therefore less and less time that they can give to you as an individual when you go for help. A further problem is that patients have been encouraged by recent governments and the media to expect more from modern medicine. Sometimes these expectations are not realistic. Patients are more aware of new treatments through newspaper and magazine articles and television and radio programmes. However, the journalists who produce this information are only interested in what is new. They will often try to "hype up" a new treatment to encourage people to read their articles or listen to their programmes. The doctors whose research they are reporting are usually much more cautious about what it can achieve.
A further new problem for doctors and patients is information about treatments that patients or their relatives can get from the Internet. Please be aware that anyone can write anything they like about any disease or treatment they like on the Internet. There is no authority available to check that this information is correct. They do not have to be medically qualified. They do not have to have done any research. They do not have to have had their work published in a peer reviewed journal. (This means a scientific journal in which other scientists have checked that the research has been done properly).
Information provided by organisations respected and approved by their national governments can usually be more relied upon e.g The Royal College of GPs, British Hypertension Society. However, it can be very difficult sometimes to know how reliable a source of information is. If you find a treatment on the Internet that your doctor hasn't heard of, therefore, it may just mean that it hasn't been reported in any respectable medical journals and isn't worth knowing about or it may be a treatment that is still at the research stage only.
To get the best from your GP therefore it is vital to fully understand the diagnosis and what treatment can be offered. Sometimes, serious illnesses can show with very vague symptoms early on, which only over time become clinically recognisable as a treatable Syndrome or clear diagnosis. Because your GP or specialist really needs much more time to explain this to you than is available, efficient and regular communication between you and your doctor is therefore very important.
Here is some advice about communication which we hope will help:-
If you are unhappy with advice/ treatment from your GP:
1. Make an appointment to see the GP. Tell the receptionist or Practice Manager that you are unhappy and want some time to talk things through. This may mean more delay before the GP can give you an appointment but it is important that they book you a longer appointment so there is more time to talk.
2. Before you see the GP, write down a list of the questions you want to ask or the things that you feel are not right or the concerns or fears that you have. Take this with you when you got to see the GP and go through your list with him/her. This will help the GP to understand your problems. It will also help you to make sure that all the areas that you don't understand or are not happy about are properly covered. (If you want, you can ask a friend or relative to go with you. This can help you remember the questions you want to ask and to understand answers that in some cases may be quite complicated. In particular, if English is not your first language, it is a very good idea to ask a friend or relative to go with you to help as an interpreter.)
3. If you are still not satisfied it may be helpful to ask if you can see one of the other partners in the practice. Going through your problems with a different doctor may help to put a different perspective on them.
4. Also consider asking to have a talk with the practice nurse. Particularly with more chronic diseases, nurse can help with advice on adapting to problems like diabetes or asthma, so that you can learn to live better with your disease. Some patients find they can communicate better with nurses than with doctors and find it easier to have things explained to them by the nurse than the doctor. Most practices have more than one nurse and often one of them specialises in your particular problems, so ask if there is a Nurse who knows your illness well such as Diabetic Nurse or Respiratory Nurse etc attached to the practice.
If you are unhappy with advice or treatment from a specialist (hospital)consultant:
1. Telephone the consultant's secretary and ask for an appointment to speak to him or her. Please do not expect this to happen quickly. Time that the consultant gives to you to go over your problem means that other work that the consultant does will have to be put aside. The secretary may want to know what you want to talk to the consultant about. Do not worry about this. Anything you tell her is strictly confidential. If the consultant knows what you are concerned about before the consultation this can help them to make sure they have all the necessary information (for example results of outstanding tests) before they see you. Sometimes it may be helpful, at least to start off with, for the consultant to speak to you over the telephone after receiving your message from their secretary.
2. As with talking to the GP, writing down your problems and going through them with the consultant should be helpful.
3. If you are still not satisfied, go back to your GP and explain what you think is wrong. Your GP should then be willing to talk directly with the consultant on your behalf.
If you believe the GP should be sending you to a specialist but he/she is not willing to do so:
Most doctors are always willing for patients to have a second opinion. In difficult cases this can be most helpful to both patient and doctor; even if the specialist opinion is that nothing more can be added to the treatment that the GP has already given. However, your GP has to be fairly convinced that a consultation with a specialist really is going to help. If GP's ask specialists to see patients that they can safely treat themselves this means that other patients, who really need to see the specialist because they have a complicated problem, will have to wait longer for an appointment and may be put at risk.
If you still believe that you do need to see a specialist, ask for an appointment with the GP and explain exactly why you are not satisfied with the diagnosis or treatment that you have been given. If the GP still believes this is not necessary, ask if you can at least have a second opinion from one of the GP's partners.
If you have already seen a specialist and are unhappy with their advice, it may be possible to have a further opinion from another specialist. This would be something that both the specialist and your GP would discuss with you. There would have to be a very good reason because to give you a further opinion means other patients waiting even longer for their turn to see a specialist. Some patients may keep on asking for further opinions because they have difficulty facing up to a diagnosis with a poor prognosis or where little treatment can be offered. They keep hoping that if they see just one more doctor they will be told what they want to hear. Talking these fears over with the GP is much more likely to help patients in this situation than seeing lots of specialists.
Many patients who cannot be cured can also be helped by other people such as physiotherapists, occupational therapists, social workers, or hospice movements like Marie Curie and St Peters. Your GP may be able to offer you a lot more than you might think by arranging this sort of help for you.
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