Oh, *Headdesk*, seriously?!?

[davidgillon]

So my sister's been trying to handle what's going on with my dad's nursing care funding, and we decided she should put in a complaint, which I drafted for her to use as a template for either talking to or emailing the nurse-assessor's line manager.

A week later and we're still trying to figure out who her line manager is, and even who she works for has been a pain in the arse to pin down.

We finally got it figured out today that we needed to speak to the local CCG (Clinical Commissioning Group - one of the government's wizard schemes to try and undermine the NHS by moving funding control into the hands of people with a profit motive, in this case the local doctors). It shouldn't be difficult to get the details of your local CCG, but if you don't know what it's called (her GP's surgery wasn't answering the phone to ask them), then it gets a wee bit more difficult. Local organisations normally go by some variant of 'South West Durham', but it turns out the CCG is 'Durham Dales, Easington and Sedgefield', and I only found that out by accident when I remembered local mental healthcare comes under the 'Durham and Eskdale NHS Trust' and googled 'dale CCG'. And I was doubly wrong as it's actually the "Tees, Esk and Wear Valley NHS Trust' (South West Durham = Wear Valley).

So she rang the CCG and actually got the receptionist, the first human she's managed to speak to in all of this. She explained what had happened and why she wants to make a complaint (by the argument the nurse-assessor is using, even dad's time in the regional acute stroke unit wouldn't count as requiring nursing care), and the receptionist said "Yes, that's definitely us you need to speak to, but I don't actually know who that should go to. I'll go find that out, and ring you back, and my name is X if you need to get back to us.'  Which was encouraging.

She rang back pretty much straight away. "Yes, the person I spoke to agrees that needs to come to us, but they don't know who should be handling it either. We've never had a complaint at this stage of the process before. Could you email it to us with a "To who it may concern" header and we promise we'll try and get it to the right people."

Seriously!? A medical organisation that knows it has a complaints procedure, but no one actually knows how to access it? (And the cherry on the cake is she did know they've contracted out the complaints process, and I'll bet it's not set up to handle medical malpractice complaints).
 

Comments

[hilarita]

You are in a maze of twisty little passages all alike.
In *theory* contracting out complaints *might* be better, because you might end up less likely to run into the problem of "Bob Can't Possibly Be Wrong, Bob Is Lovely". I suspect it won't be like that.

[davidgillon]

"You met a grue"

[yhlee]

!!!

Sorry y'all have to deal with this, and best wishes getting it sorted.

[davidgillon]

Thanks, Yoon.

[jesse_the_k]

This is so many kinds of wrong.

In the U.S. we can contact our members of congress for help with government health care. Do MPs offer any sorts of services like that? Barring their assistance, would you like me to rent you a flamethrower?

[davidgillon]

Yeah, we could draft in the local MP, but we need to get a bit further down the line before that reasonably becomes feasible. At the moment all we have to object to is someone saying they'll recommend Dad's funding is stopped, we really need the CCG to confirm they're doing that to involve other people in opposing it, but we're trying to make sure it doesn't get that far.

[vass]

So what I'm reading here is that if your father didn't have people advocating for him, there would be absolutely no way he could manage this process himself, and even for the people doing the advocating it's nearly impossible. In other words, the system is working as designed. The fuckers.

[davidgillon]

Yeah, the home has mentioned she's done the same to at least four people, not sure if that's including Dad or not, and not all the residents have family to advocate for them. Nor are most families going to be able to advocate for them as well as we can.