How to hear what people are telling us.

Every person who complains needs to be treated with dignity and respect, this means listening at an early stage and empathising and acknowledging their unhappiness.  In Mental Health there is another layer, some patients may not be able to express themselves well and some complaints can appear to be, at first glance, solely the product of a psychotic illness.  This means we must take extra care over this and take the time to dig deeper into the letter to identify any important concerns that need to be investigated.

 

A good example of this comes from a recent Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) surgery that we held on an inpatient ward.  The client spent a lot of time telling the Patient Experience Lead about various people in his life that had tried to poison him on many occasions; on discussion with the Consultant Psychiatrist it transpired that at least one of these incidents had in fact taken place.  Whilst this did not relate to the complaint he made, clearly he was not deluded over this fact.  Care must be taken not to dismiss allegations because of a diagnosis and/or confusion being experienced by the patient to avoid important information from being lost. 

In our Patient Experience Team all complaints are taken seriously, and even when a complaint is not upheld we seek to be sensitive in our response by acknowledging the distress felt by the complainant and looking for areas of future service improvement and learning.   If someone is very unwell at the time of writing a complaint we try and recognise in a sensitive way and provide the complainant with the dignity and respect they deserve in our response.  We aim to listen, acknowledge, apologise where necessary and will support clinical services to make changes where they are needed. 

We think our strategy is working well - have you made a recent complaint and received a response from us?  What did you think?