Note: Following Assessment by the United Kingdom Statistics Authority, the statistics in Data on Written Complaints publications were recommended to continue designation as National Statistics, subject to a number of requirements being met. As part of satisfying these requirements an Aid to interpretation document (including an updated Data Quality Statement) has been issued on 30 March 2012.

Summary

The NHS complaints procedure is the statutorily based mechanism for dealing with complaints about NHS care and treatment and all NHS organisations in England are required to operate the procedure. This annual collection is a count of written complaints made by (or on behalf of) patients, received between 1 April 2010 and 31 March 2011.

Key facts

Note: HCHS = Hospital and Community Health Services, FHS = Family Health Services.
For HCHS data NHS Foundation trusts (FTs) are currently asked to provide this data voluntarily, in 2010-11, 29 FTs did not provide any written complaint information.

• Total number of all written complaints reported (HCHS & FHS combined) in 2010-11 was 148,200 a decrease of 3,700 (2.4 per cent) from 2009-10. For organisations providing data in both years (352) the total number of complaints (HCHS & FHS combined) has increased slightly by 0.3 per cent from 145,000 to 145,400 in 2010-11.
• Total number of all HCHS written complaints reported has decreased by 3.6 per cent from 101,100 in 2009-10 to 97,500 in 2010-11. For organisations providing data in both years the total number of HCHS complaints has increased by 0.5 per cent from 94,200 to 94,700 in 2010-11.
• Total number of all FHS written complaints reported has seen a slight decrease of 50 (0.1 per cent) from 50,760 in 2009-10 to 50,710 in 2010-11.