The Patient Experience Team (PET) is working hard to operate business as usual and will continue to receive new complaints via email, over the phone, in the post and via our service teams. The team are all currently working remotely so any complaints received via post may be delayed due to no office presence, but we will monitor this as best we can. There are currently no changes to our complaint and concern timescales.

Our phone lines will be operating as normal (9.30am-4.30pm, Mon – Fri) and email address will be monitored as usual (between the hours of 9am-4.30pm Mon – Fri). Please use this phone line for any queries you may have regarding LCH services. We will listen in confidence and we will aim to provide you with information, advice and signpost you to the right departments.

We would like to hear from you about your experiences of our healthcare services and we will listen to your suggestions on how we can improve.

We want to make sure that our patients receive excellent care that is delivered in a respectful and courteous way. You can help us do this by letting us know how we are doing.

Although we always try to provide the best possible care, we know that sometimes things can go wrong. We hope we can sort out most problems easily and quickly. We welcome all feedback, from anyone, whether positive or negative, because it helps us to identify where things are working well and where improvements may need to be made.

We aim to deal with your feedback in one of three ways:

• We can pass it to the service lead to share with the team
• If you would like the service to respond to you, we can process the feedback as a concern and then a service manager will contact you directly to talk about what happened by the end of the next working day
• Or we can record a complaint, and we can investigate and respond in writing.

How we deal with your complaint

We will need to talk to you so we can clearly understand your complaint, the exact issues you are complaining about and how we can best address the issues you have raised. We can do this via telephone or email, whichever suits you best.

We may be able to resolve some issues quickly, but others may take longer and may need a more detailed investigation.

We will:

• Acknowledge your complaint within three working days
• Agree with you how we will try and resolve your complaint
• Discuss how long it should take to respond and keep you informed
• Find out what happened or what went wrong
• Make sure you receive an appropriate apology
• Make it possible for you to discuss the problem with the service concerned
• Ensure we share learning outcomes from concerns and complaints, so that the problem doesn’t happen again for you or others

If you are making a complaint on behalf of someone else, we will need their permission in order for us to respond to you.  This is because we are legally required to protect the confidentiality of our patients. We will request the patient’s consent after you have contacted us.