In this guide, we look at how you can raise a health complaint yourself. It has information on where to start, who to contact, how our Health Complaints Advocacy service can help and where else you can go for support with your complaint.

To open each section of the guide, please click on the subheadings with the plus signs next to them. If you have any comments or thoughts about the guide, please email our team at [email protected].

Useful resources

To help with making a health complaint, we have some more free resources that can help. They are:

  • Written complaint letter templates – these can provide a complaint letter format with information about what to include:
    • One for an initial complaint letter – this can be used to help with the Stage One and Stage Two of the complaint process.
    • Another for Ongoing Concerns (OCS) – this is about a complaint that is ongoing.
  • A Local Resolution Meeting (LRM) meeting planner – this can help to plan what you would like to say in this meeting and any outcomes you would like after the meeting.
  • A Health Complaints letter guidebook – this document has information on what is needed in each section to help create a template letter.

All the resources are in Microsoft Word format. To download them, please click on the buttons below.

Complaint Stages

Under the NHS Complaint Regulations, you have a right to raise a complaint about any care and treated you have received that was directly from or funded by the NHS.

This has two stages:

  • Stage 1 is the Local Resolution Stage, where an informal concern or a formal complaint is sent to the service for them to respond to.

  • Stage 2 is the Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman stage. The Ombudsman will then look at how the complaint was responded to in Stage 1, and if they believe the service has not responded to your complaint appropriately, take action.

Informal Concerns

Informal Concerns are a way for a service to quickly resolve issues that have come up for a patient.

Informal Concerns should be raised to the practice manager of a GP surgery, dentist surgery, or to the Patient Experience Team of a Hospital or Trust.

The practice manager or patient experience team should contact you within a few days, normally via telephone to discuss your concerns.

The service will attempt to answer your questions and solve the problem with you. You will generally not get a letter, but the service should contact you to discuss your concerns.

  • Ask for a time frame for the outcomes or when you should contact the service again if you don’t hear from them.
  • Be clear in the outcome you want and ask how you can achieve it.

Formal Complaint

A formal complaint is a complaint taken under the NHS Complaint Regulations and is responded to as per these regulations. This means that you will get a written response to your complaint, and if you are unhappy with the response, you can raise ongoing concerns or take it to the Ombudsman.

A formal complaint can be made verbally (in-person or over the phone) or in writing, such as a complaint letter or a complaint form.

There is a slightly different process, depending on the size of the service.

  • For GP services, the practice manager will investigate, speaking to the people involved and looking at records. The practice manager will then write up a complaint response and sent it to you.
  • For NHS Hospital Trusts, the complaint is handled by the complaints team. They will allocate it to a complaint investigator, a qualified member of the Trust who will investigate the complaint alongside their other duties.
    This will involve speaking to services, reviewing notes and discussing your case with staff. This information will then be fed back to the complaints team.

The service will respond to your complaint in the form of a letter. The service will always apologise for how they have made you feel and explain why the actions taken were taken. They also will look at complaints as part of improving the service in the future.

If appropriate, they might offer you a Local Resolution Meeting. This is a meeting between yourself, the complaint handler and the managers of the services involved. They can discuss the complaint response in person, answer any lingering questions and provide clarity around complicated terms or procedures.

These meetings will generally be recorded or have someone taking minutes and you will be provided with a copy of this after the meeting.

  • Make it clear you wish for this to be looked at as a formal complaint, such as writing you wish to raise a formal complaint in your letter, or if you are giving the complaint verbally, telling the staff member that you want it to be looked at as a formal complaint.
  • Ask for them to acknowledge receipt of the complaint to ensure they have received it and will be investigating.
  • Ask them for a time frame you should expect further contact before you will chase up the response.
  • Ask for any reasonable adjustments you need for the response in your initial complaint, such as easy read or an audio recording of the response.

Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman Complaint (PHSO)

The PHSO is the final stage of the NHS Complaint process before a Judicial Review. The PHSO look at how the complaint was handled by the service, and if it meets their complaint guidelines.

A complaint to the PHSO is raised by sending them a copy of their PHSO form, as well as your consent form and a copy of all the complaint letters you have sent to the service and their complaint responses.

Once the complaint is submitted, it is put onto the waiting list to be reviewed by a complaints handler. This complaints handler will check the details, and if the PHSO can respond and then contact you to let you know if they will investigate further.

If they believe they can, it will be passed to an investigator and they will provide a written response to your complaint. If not, they will send you a letter explaining why they cannot investigate.

The PHSO have a list of potential outcomes for your complaint on their website. You can find them at https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/making-complaint/what-we-can-and-cant-help

  • If needs be, you can email the service you are complaining about to ask for a copy of all the complaint documents you need to send to the PHSO.
  • The PHSO time frame for a complaint being submitted to a complaint being look at if they will investigate is around seven to eight months. This can take a long time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. At The Advonet Group, we can help you to raise a formal complaint to the service directly, the Integrated Care Board or to the PHSO. Call our First Contact Team on 0113 244 0606 to open a referral.

The NHS Complaint Regulations and Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman ask that complaints be brought to the service within either:

  • 12 months of the incident happening
  • 12 months of you finding out you had reason to complain

If you are outside of the time limit, it is at the service’s discretion if they will respond to the complaint, and the PHSO legally might not be able to look at the complaint. You can explain the reasons for delays, and they will consider this.

If your complaint is about multiple different services but the issue is connected, you can do what is called a “joint complaint”.

There is no time frame set out in the NHS Complaint Regulations that complaints must be responded to by. Services often have their own internal guidelines for responding to complaints. However, after six months, if you have not had a complaint response, the service must explain the reason for the delay.

After six months, you can contact the Ombudsman and ask them to intervene.

You can take legal action as well as raising a complaint via the NHS Complaint Regulations.

You must have brought the case to court within three years of the incident happening. As it can take time to find a lawyer, and for them to put the case together, if you are wanting to take legal action, the sooner the better.

We are not a legal service, or legally trained, and as such we would signpost you to Action Against Medical Accidents, a charity that helps people understand their legal rights around the NHS and can put people in contact with medical solicitors.

Your complaint can be sent to:

  • The service directly
  • The local Integrated Care Board (ICB)

A complaint sent to the ICB will be passed onto the service to investigate directly, but the ICB will act as the complaint controller. This means they will confirm it meets their standards before they send you the complaint response.

The NHS Complaint process is not set up to be an adversarial one. It is a way for the NHS to reflect, learn from its mistakes and identify issues. As such, services will investigate issues themselves or by complaint handlers within the service.

You can raise your complaints to the following other services, depending on:

  • If your complaint is about inaccurate data, how the data has been handled or if your data has been misused, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
  • If your complaint is about a GP, Hospital or Dental Practice, you can raise your concerns to the Care Quality Commission.
  • If your complaint is about a specific doctor, you can raise it to the General Medical Council.
  • If your complaint is about a specific nurse or midwife, you can contact the Nursing and Midwifery Council.
  • If your complaint is about a specific dentist, you can contact the General Dentist Council – https://www.gdc-uk.org

Please note that The Advonet Group cannot help you with raising a complaint to these services, as they fall outside the NHS Complaint Regulations.