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.

The Ombudsman's damning report of cruel neglect of vulnerable elderly patients in NHS hospitals and staff's callous indifference to their suffering

The Ombudsman's damning report of cruel neglect of vulnerable elderly patients in NHS hospitals and callous indifference to their suffering by staff employed to look after them has filled our newspapers and our broadcast media. See Telegraph report here, BBC report here, Guardian report here. We have many times over many years read of such horrors. Nothing appropriate is ever done about this atrocious cruelty by healthcare staff on their innocent fellow citizens - their patients, their victims. Read the Comments left beneath the newspaper articles and see other sickening examples of arrant cruelty by our highly-paid healthcare staff.

Since its inception the NHS has been protected from censure and sanction alike in matters of professional negligence. For decades its damaged victims were prohibited from even making a complaint! Then when complaints at last were permitted, the standard response to serious complaints was that the complainant was mistaken, lying, half-witted, mentally ill, trying to obtain compensation without cause, and similar nonsense directed toward attacking the complainant rather than investigating the complaint. Nothing was done about actually dealing with the complaints. And this is still the case.

In the intervening years it has become easier to make a complaint, but still nothing is done about the complaint, and the cases of negligence are increasing - inevitably, since the staff learn more and more surely, that they are unaccountable. The NHS Complaints Procedures are, and are designed to be, exercises in futility, and the Government is hoping to put an end to any scrap of justice for victims of medical negligence who go to Law by removing the possibility of legal aid in these cases.

As usual people who are ever-ready to defend the indefensible assure us that these flaws must be looked at in perspective, likewise assuring us that the vast majority of NHS patients are happy with their treatment. - Not remotely true, dear Reader. - That there are a lot of people ready to defend the NHS is not unconnected with the fact that the NHS is the largest employer in Europe, and so its employees and their dependants defend it. By contrast, read this Guardian article: "Half the patients treated in NHS hospitals are dissatisfied with the standard of care, a survey by the consumer organisation Which? reveals today. But it found few patients complain to NHS staff about inedible food, lack of cleanliness or poor organisation on the wards.

Among those who were dissatisfied, over a third thought raising an issue would not make any difference. Almost a quarter said nothing because they "expected their hospital stay to be like that" and 12% feared that a complaint would provoke reprisals and compromise their care.

Which? said doctors, managers and politicians interpreted the low level of complaints as evidence of patient satisfaction. But the survey suggested they were fooling themselves."

Complaints in hospitals are appallingly dealt with.

Watchdogs rail about lack of NHS office sense - Sunday Telegraph

Extracts:

"Complaints in hospitals are often appallingly dealt with because junior clerks fail to apply common sense, the Health Service Ombudsman has warned, writes Laura Donnelly.

Ann Abraham said that distressed patients and bereaved relatives were often left battling bureaucracy when "a bit of courage and common sense" was all it took to resolve simple issues.

Speaking ahead of publication of her annual report on the NHS, Miss Abraham said she was concerned that hospitals and GPs were not learning simple lessons raised in countless reports.

Latest figures show the total number of complaints rose to 138,000 by 2006, a rise of 5,000 on the previous year. Meanwhile, 8,000 unresolved cases were passed to the NHS inspectorate, the Healthcare Commission - more than twice the number it expected when it took on the role three years ago. On top of this, hundreds of complaints are going to the ombudsman's office, with latest figures due out on Thursday.

Both watchdogs expressed concern that NHS staff are not dealing with complaints properly."

"Marcia Fry, the head of operational development at the Healthcare Commission said that its current audit of hospital complaints suggested more than a quarter of trusts made little effort to ensure that patients did not suffer worse treatment if they complained.

The results of the audit, due out in September, will show that in 27 per cent of cases, it was not clear that patients who raised complaints would not be discriminated against.

Miss Fry said that staff needed clear information on patients' rights and training to ensure they were not "inadvertently discriminating" against those making complaints."

It seems odd to focus on 'inadvertent' discrimination against those making complaints, when there is such massive intentional discrimination against complainants...)o: