Apparently there is a “Scottish Health Council“, I hadn’t heard of them until last week. The Council is part of the NHS Quality Improvement Scotland and it is their job to evaluate how well NHS boards are taking account of people’s views. They produce a Newsletter three times a year, this is available in English, Polish, Urdu and traditional Chinese and a new one has just been released.
The aim of the Scottish Health Council is to promote patient focus and public involvement in Scotland. They help patients, carers and the public to feed back their views on NHS services to NHS Scotland (however they don’t deal with complaints about NHS boards, which makes me wonder what they do do?). They have a local office at Foresterhill (in Westburn House), the contact details are here.
As a follow on from my earlier post (How to complain about the NHS), you might like to read the research on the Scottish Health Council website called “Making it Better – Complaints and feedback from patients and carers about NHS Services in Scotland“. Here they state that from 37 million contacts about 11,000 people make a complaint about NHS Scotland each year. The most common things complained about were lack of information/poor communication and staff attitude and behaviour. The report says that more than half of people don’t complain about problems they have encountered. Many people are scared of repercussions if they do complain and most people think that making a complaint wouldn’t make a difference.
What do you think of this research? Have you made a complaint to the NHS? How was it handled?
Online Links - Full Web Address for Links
- http://www.scottishhealthcouncil.org/shcp/415.html
- http://www.scottishhealthcouncil.org/shcp/655.html
- http://www.scottishhealthcouncil.org/shcp/860.html
- http://www.scottishhealthcouncil.org/shcp/1284.html
- http://understandingcancer.co.uk/2009/11/24/how-to-complain-about-the-nhs/
- http://www.scottishhealthcouncil.org/shcp/files/R09_Making_It_Better_NHS_Complaints.pdf
