The Daily Mail reports that patients are being struck off GPs' lists just for daring to make a complaint

The Daily Mail reports that patients are being struck off GPs' lists just for daring to make a complaint. The article is commenting on a report by Health Service Ombudsman Ann Abraham.

"In one case, an elderly woman and her husband were removed after she wrote to the practice manager to complain that receptionists did not answer the phone while she was trying to book an appointment for their seasonal flu jabs. In a telephone call the practice manager warned them he would ‘get you struck off for this’. Shortly afterwards they were removed from the surgery’s list."

So making a complaint is punishable by being removed from the doctor's list... I invite you to compare this mean-spirited injustice with the way that complaints are dealt with in the commercial world. If you were to complain to Sainsburys or Tesco or M & S, I think you could be pretty sure that the complaint would be investigated and that you would receive a prompt, polite response with a detailed explanation for what had gone wrong, together with thanks for drawing the matter to their attention, apology for your inconvenience and very probably a voucher as recompense. And you could be absolutely sure that you would not be threatened with being banned from their stores! Decent businesses use complaints to improve their service to the public. Not so the NHS.

GPs are, as near as dammit, unaccountable to the public who pay their bloated salaries. (UK doctors are the highest-paid in Europe.) Even extremely grave errors routinely incur neither censure nor penalty. - Read Can you trust your doctor? The non-accountability of doctors encourages arrogance and increasing careless professional negligence. - Here is my own dreadful experience of the NHS Complaints Procedures. Why do so many doctors give such poor service? - Because they can.

Our present government claims that it is seeking to provide greater patient choice. What nonsense! Patient choice in the UK is, as ever, Like it or Lump it!

Update, Wed 19th October 2011: also see today's Daily Mail follow-up article on this subject.

'New NHS rating website coming'

New NHS rating website coming

Extracts:

"Using the new site, the public will be able to express their opinions of individual doctors and hospitals."

"The spokesperson said: "The NHS does amazing things every day. "We want people to put down their views. Good or bad, we want an honest review of the services they have received.""

I think they'll have a hard job convincing people that they want to hear 'good or bad' of the NHS and that people who report bad treatment will not be 'punished' in some way! - From my personal experience, it is routine for patients damaged by the NHS to be treated abominably - victimised - even more so when they make a justified complaint - to be insulted, bullied, humiliated, accused of lying, refused appropriate investigations/treatment and to have their condition and their suffering trivialised... - I am not alone in this experience. I have been providing a free helpline for people harmed by NHS doctors/dentists for nearly 20 years and I have never heard of even one person for whom there was a satisfactory outcome from making a complaint! Despite much-vaunted 'medical ethics', doctors seem to regard victims of medical negligence not as damaged fellow human beings in need of help, but as adversaries or nuisances.

As a steroid victim (i.e. massively harmed by being inappropriately prescribed HRT in far too high a dose and inadequately monitored - for nearly ten years) I remain very ill and disabled and in great pain, but I have not been to see a G.P. since 1999. I would prefer to give them no further opportunity to harm me. Consulting them was an ordeal that only added to my health problems. - I'll add that I have never been other than courteous and reasonable in all my dealings with doctors and never registered a complaint about any of them, knowing how futile such complaints are in this country, and being too ill and exhausted to want to waste time and energy and experience further victimisation.

You can read about other people's experiences of the NHS (and the futility of complaining about the NHS) on Medical Mistakes and AvMA (click on 'Share experience' and then go to the forum pages) and Patient Protect. And my website is http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ (My website does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful and essential information which doctors do not give their patients.)

UK dentist, David Quelch, who pulled out an elderly woman's teeth without anaesthetic "to teach her a lesson" has been thrown out of the profession.

Dentist pulled out teeth 'as a lesson' (UK)

Extract:

"David Quelch left the 87-year-old with blood pouring from her mouth after she made a complaint about previous treatment at his hands, a discipline hearing was told yesterday.

He was found guilty of serious professional misconduct by the General Dental Council yesterday and the committee ordered his name be removed from the register."

I believe that in cases like this - professional malpractice and deliberate cruelty in order to punish and victimise a complainant - the police should be involved and there should be criminal procedures. I also think that this fellow should pay substantial monetary recompense to his victim without her having to pay a solicitor to take the matter to the civil courts, if she should so choose. - In my opinion, the General Dental Council and the General Medical Council are of little use to anyone other than the many negligent members of their respective professions, but at least they have, in this instance, 'struck him off', though incredibly they "found charges that he restrained her and against her will not proved."!!! - It would have been heart-warming if the GDC had had the power to order him to pay money to his victim, and had exercised that power.

THE COMPLAINTS DEPARTMENT - Poem by Margaret Wilde

The Complaints Department
(dedicated to the NHS Complaints Procedures)

This is the gate
Through which you must go
To get to the door
Of the passage
That leads
To the tunnel
And thence to the stairway,
The which you ascend
(As you tire),
And you find
At the top
That the hatches
Are down
And there stands in your path
A half-witted
Deaf-mute
With a gun.

© 1986 Margaret Wilde