Feedback, concerns and complaints

You can give feedback anonymously (without telling us your name or details). You can also provide your contact details if you’d like us to contact you about your experience.

We use your feedback to improve what we do. We look at all the feedback we receive and feed this back into our services, so we can make GOSH an even better hospital.

If you leave a compliment, we will make sure that this is passed on to the staff member or team, so they know how well they are doing.

PALS is our Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS). They offer confidential advice, support and information.

PALS are here to:

• Help and advise on any issue related to your hospital experience. They will listen, offer support and try to resolve any concerns.
• Liaise with the various departments in the hospital on your behalf to resolve your problems and where appropriate refer you to outside support and advise.
• Provide health information on a wide range of medical conditions.

PALS attempts to resolve any problems quickly. However, if you want to make a formal complaint about any aspect of your NHS experience, PALS can advise and guide you through the complaints process.

PALS promises to:

• Contact you within two working days of your request.
• Advise you on the options available and help you to resolve your problem.
• Keep you regularly informed of the progress of any action you ask us to take on your behalf.

Use your experiences to help improve services in the future.

Please include:

• What happened (or didn’t happen). Try to give us as much detail as possible and include any dates, locations and who was involved.
• Your/ Your child’s name, date of birth and hospital number.
• If you are complaining on behalf of someone else or if your child is over 16, we may need their written consent.

We will confirm that we have received your complaint within three working days. We will let you know about the support available for you when making a complaint, and when we hope to respond to your complaint by.

We will then investigate what happened and where appropriate, how we can learn and stop it from happening again. If the investigation takes longer than expected, we will contact you to let you know the reasons why and when you will receive a response.

When the investigation is completed, the Chief Executive will send you a letter explaining the results of the investigation and any action that has been taken in response to your complaint. We can provide the report and response in other formats, for example as an audio file or in an Easy Read format- please let us know.

Please let our Complaints team know if you are not happy or have remaining concerns or questions. We can talk through these concerns and/or organise a meeting with any of the staff involved, where appropriate.

You also have the right to bring your complaint to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. This service looks into complaints that have already been made and checks if they agree with what the organisation found out and reported. This service is free to use and independent of the NHS. You can call their helpline on 0345 015 4033 or visit Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman website.

Anyone can make a formal complaint. You do not need to be a certain age.

No. We need to know your details so we can properly investigate what happened.

Yes. The Complaints team can help you to write your complaint. We can also provide an interpreter if needed.

You may also wish to contact an independent advocacy service such as VoiceAbility for help. VoiceAbility support people to be heard in decisions about their health, care and wellbeing and offer free advice and support. They are an independent charity and one of the UK’s largest providers of advocacy and involvement services.

You can contact VoiceAbility Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm.

You can call them on 0300 303 1660 or email helpline@voiceability.org. Or visit the VoiceAbility website.

Ideally, as soon as possible. Complaints should normally be made within 12 months of the incident or of it coming to your attention.

No. Making a complaint will not affect your/ your child’s care. Complaints are also not recorded on medical records.

If you think that your time at GOSH is being affected by having made a complaint, please tell us immediately.

Yes. We take all complaints seriously, and our aim is to learn from your experience so we can improve how we provide care.