The Isle of Wight NHS Trust has seen a drop in the number of complaints made about it to the Ombudsman, placing it now in third position, rather than leading the scoreboard.
Back in November 2014, the IW NHS Trust had to defend their first place position having received the most complaints per 100,000 clinical incidents in the country.
Reduction in number of complaints
The latest report (embedded below for your convenience) published by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman reveals the number of complaints against the IW NHS Trust reduced from 44 in 2013-14 to 38 in 2014-15.
The latest Ombudsman report states that many of the complaints refer to several different aspects of the service received.
Types of complaints
The following reasons (across the country rather than specifically IW) are the most cited among those complaints about acute trusts the Ombudsman investigated in 2014-15:
- 21% of all complaints in 2014-15 related to attitudes of staff to patients and their families.
- 31% of complaints were for a failure to diagnose correctly.
- 38% of all complaints investigated related to clinical care and treatment
- 35% of the complaints investigated related to poor communication
Healthwatch survey
The local watchdog, Healthwatch, have been running a survey this year, asking patients and their families to let them know if they’ve been unhappy with how the IW NHS Trust deals with complaints.
This followed a CQC report which revealed the Trust only responded to 47% of complaints between October 2013 and March 2014 within the 25 day target, or within agreed timescales.
Difficult to compare with other Trusts
It’s worth noting that caution is suggested when trying to compare the IW NHS against other trusts because of how
The report states:
“Isle of Wight NHS Trust is an integrated provider, supplying acute, community, mental health, and ambulance health care. Caution should be exercised when comparing results from the Isle of Wight with other Acute Trusts.”
Image: © Used with the kind permission of Auntie P
