Our ambition is to see a significant improvement in the quality of complaints and concerns handling in all services across the BCUHB. We believe that this an important part of ensuring that people receive safe, high-quality care.
We actively encourage people to raise any issues or concerns, as part of our commitment to become a learning organisation and as part of our agenda of continuous improvement. The voice of the people we serve, is pivotal in providing us insight, into how we can improve. We provide a number of different ways for people to do this including formal feedback, through complaints, incident and patient feedback, and informally through patient stories, as well as ensuring the Patient Advice Liaison Service (PALS) Team, is actively engaged at grassroots levels of the organisation, where it matters and most impact can be felt by people in the communities we serve.
As the largest Health Board in Wales, serving one third of the entire Welsh population, we do receive a significant number of enquiries and complaints and unfortunately sometimes it can take us longer than we would like, and people expect to respond. This can be for a number of reasons, such as the complexity of the complaint or the availability of staff to conclude an enquiry, but we know this is an area where we need to improve and are working hard to do so.
Significant work has been undertaken to improve our complaint handling services, based on the following principles of good complaint management.
Complaints handling is an excellent proxy to develop an open, transparent and learning culture that we would expect to see embedded throughout the organisation, and are fully committed to doing so. Patient (and their families) experience of health care gives us an important insight to help us plan and improve services.