We are currently celebrating a huge turnaround in our complaints handling service for patients and their families.

It's been overhauled with such effect we met our target of not having any complaints overdue at the end of November. And by the end of January we expect to be back in that position after catchup after the holiday period.

In October last year we had 70 complaints that were past their due time and it had been as high as 90 in some months so this is a big achievement.

We would like to thank all colleagues who have worked hard to get us to this position. The challenge now is to sustain this! We now have a few responses overdue following the Christmas period, but we are closely keeping track of these to get them out to people as soon as possible so that we can be back at our target position of no complaints responses overdue by the end of January.

We currently get around 12 complaints each week of varying complexity and they arrive via the form on the website, letter, email, or PALS the Patient Advice and Liaison Service.

Our Trust’s timescale for responding to complaints is 25 working days to answer the less complex complaints, and up to 40 for the others - giving them time to reflect the complexity of the complaints.

Our Patient Advice and Complaints Manager,  Gerard Curran said the turnaround is due to the Trust being committed to a new focus on the service with Director of Nursing Brendan Brown and the involvement of the ADNs in the process.

The complaints department sends out a weekly track for all opened complaints which monitors the timeless of responses.  Each division also gets a weekly breakdown of their complaints which shows the number of complaints they have open and the number of days they have been open.  These trackers help keep the division on target as the identify any potential issues at an early stage.

The complaints department are also planning a restructure of the team and assign a designated complaints co-ordinator for each division.  This means that the same person opening and closing the complaints for a division; at the moment this is done by a different person, which can lead to delays.  The hope is that a designated complaints co-ordinator will provide more support to the divisions as they will know who they need to approach in the first instance for any complaint queries, and also this will mean that the complaints co-ordinator can also help monitor the timeless of responses for the divisions they are responsible for.

Gerard joined us a year ago from Pennine Acute Trust. He has a background in litigation and became involved in NHS complaints when Pennine outsourced their legal and complaints department to a solicitors firm where he worked.

Gerard, said: " I am from a litigation background but really enjoy my work in the NHS.  Now we have cleared our backlog it means I can focus on the trend analysis of the complaints and the learning from the complaints, which should hopefully reduce the numbers coming to us."