Practices can expect to be treated fairly if they are contacted by the ombudsman looking into patient complaints, explains Sally Capper

We know it can be worrying if someone complains to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman about you or your practice, particularly if you haven’t had any contact with us before.

We want to reassure you and help you understand the work we do and how we can help you.

What do we do? The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman makes final decisions on complaints that have not been resolved by the NHS in England or UK government departments and other public services.

We can consider complaints about any NHS service, including about individual GP surgeries, primary care networks and GP confederations.

Our service is independent, free and fair. Our role is not to look at the conduct of individual healthcare professionals in the same as way the General Medical Council or Nursing and Midwifery Council.

During 2024/5 we:

• dealt with 123,987 enquiries on our helpline
• made decisions on 37,454 complaints, including 7,727 detailed investigations (more about this below)
• made 1,274 recommendations on the complaints we upheld or partly upheld
• trained 997 NHS staff and 200 UK central government colleagues in complaint handling.

Each year, roughly a third of the complaints we receive are about GP surgeries. This is not surprising given how many patient interactions you have all day, every day and that you provide a service most people will use.

However, of those complaints, we only carry out a detailed investigation of relatively few. In 2024/2025, complaints about GP services made up less than 1% of the detailed investigations we carried out.  

How we work

We don’t investigate every complaint we receive so we carefully consider which ones need our input.

What does this mean for practices and GP organisations?

We may need to ask you for information about the complaint to help with this. We have the same powers as a court to obtain any information we need so, if we contact you, you do not need to worry about giving us information from a data protection perspective. Please speak to the caseworker involved if you have any questions about this.

If we can see a way for your practice or organisation to resolve a complaint, we will work with you and the complainant to achieve this. We also use mediation, where appropriate, to reach resolutions that are agreeable to all involved.

We take lots of things into account when deciding if we should investigate a complaint. This includes:

• if it looks like something may have gone wrong
• the impact the event(s) had on the person involved
• if we can achieve the outcome the complainant wants
• if the person has taken or could take legal action to reach the outcome they want.

If you have followed good practice and met the requirements of the Local Authority Social Services and National Health Service Complaints (England) Regulations 2009, when handling and responding to the complaint, there shouldn’t be any action left for us to take. It is likely we won’t decide to carry out a detailed investigation.

If we decide to investigate a complaint and we find that something has gone wrong, we will look to see if you have already taken action to put things right.

If we think the problem hasn’t been sufficiently addressed, we will recommend actions for you to take. These can include actions to put things right for the person affected and actions to prevent the same mistake happening again.

You can read more about what happens if someone complains about your organisation here .

Resources for practices to use on handling complaints

We have worked with NHS providers, regulators and other key stakeholders to set out a clear vision for what good complaint handling looks like. The NHS Complaint Standards draw on existing guidance and encourage a consistent approach to complaint handling.

The standards support you and your practice to:

• deliver everyday good complaint handling
• meet the expectations of people who complain about your service
• use feedback from complaints to make service improvements.

To help you meet the NHS Complaint Standards we have produced ‘how to’ guides for every step of the process, along with a model complaint handling procedure, letter templates and other useful resources. You can adapt these to work for your practice. We also provide online training.

You can find the information on our website here.

Our Stakeholder Engagement team is ready to answer any questions you have about our processes or the Complaint Standards. We are happy to meet you, your team or local network (virtually) to talk in more detail about what we do; what to expect if someone escalates their complaint to us and how the Complaint Standards can help you make the most of complaints.

Please contact us by email at [email protected]

Sally Capper is Stakeholder Engagement Manager at the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman