Healthwatch Isle of Wight revists IW NHS Trust complaints Procedures

As a follow up to the recommendations made in our 2015 report, senior staff at the IW NHS Trust invited us to revisit the hospital to look at whether the additional staff training and revised literature was having a positive impact on the patient experience of raising a complaint.

Our Enter and View Authorised Representatives visited St Marys hospital earlier this year and the report has now been published. We found that:

• complaints posters and leaflets were displayed much more widely throughout the hospital than on the previous visit and that the language used was much clearer.

Although,

• PALS literature was still difficult to understand.
• Staff knowledge of the complaints procedure had remained fairly consistent with the previous visits which is disappointing considering additional training is said to have taken place.
• Staff were however found to be polite and friendly.

In response to the report the Isle of Wight NHS Trust have said;

Thank you to Healthwatch IW for conducting a revisit of our complaints process and for producing the follow up report on 'Complaints accessibility for IW residents'. It is important to us that patients and their relatives or carers are able to access a good service; the Enter and View visits give us good insight and understanding around patients experience of that service. We were pleased to see an improvement in their findings compared to Healthwatch's previous report in 2015. We are aware that we still have work to do and we will ensure that the recommendations within the report are incorporated into our review of the complaints process. The literature and posters relating to PALS and complaints will be reconsidered and we will continue to provide training to staff in complaints handling so we have consistency across the Trust.