Feedback & complaints

If you’d like to submit feedback or a complaint about any hospital, NHS Lothian or East Lothian Health and Social Care Partnership services, including CWIC Direct, CWIC Mental Health, the MSK Line or CTAC community nursing, please direct these to the NHS Lothian Patient Experience team rather than to the Practice – thank you.

Feedback

We welcome feedback and see it as an opportunity to review and improve the services we offer to you. You can send us feedback, compliments and suggestions through our online form or by filling in a feedback form in our main waiting room. We don’t respond to every piece of feedback submitted, but aim to share a summary of feedback which has been passed on to us (and any actions we’ve taken because of it) with patients regularly.

Sending us feedback is different to the formal complaints process.

Complaints

We’re committed to providing high quality care and treatment to people in our community through the delivery of safe, effective and person-centred care. We understand that sometimes things go wrong, though. If you’re not happy with something we’ve done, or haven’t done, please tell us and we’ll do our best to put things right. If we can’t resolve matters in the way you want, we’ll explain why it’s not possible for us to do this.

You can complain by:

  • Talking to one of our Reception team first, to see if it’s something they’re able to resolve for you
  • Filling in a complaints form at Reception, or writing a letter to us
  • Emailing [email protected]
  • Asking one of our Reception team to arrange a call with our Patient Experience Manager

If you’re submitting a complaint about care given to someone else we’ll need to get their consent for us to respond to you, if they’re aged 16 years or over.

How we respond to complaints

All complaints are taken seriously and investigated fully.

We aim to respond to stage 1 complaints within 5 working days.

We aim to respond to stage 2 complaints which require clinical review within 20 working days. We aim to let you know within 3 working days, if this is the case for you. You can request at any point that we deal with your issue as a stage 2 complaint, if you want to.

What if I’m not happy with how you dealt with my complaint?

You can fill in our complaints handling feedback form to let us know. This is also available from Reception.

If a complaint has been through our stage 1 and stage 2 complaints procedures, if you’re not happy with our response you can also contact the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO).

 The SPSO can’t normally look at:

  • A complaint that hasn’t been through our complaints procedure
  • Events that happened, or that you became aware of, more than a year ago
  • A matter that’s been (or is being considered) in court

You can contact the SPSO at:

Scottish Public Services Ombudsman
Bridgeside House
99 McDonald Road
Edinburgh
EH7 4NS

Freephone (to also arrange contact in person): 0800 377 7330
Online contact www.spso.org.uk/contact-us
Website www.spso.org.uk

Our full complaints procedure

The information in our full complaints handling procedure covers:

  • Who can make a complaint
  • What you can and can’t complain about
  • Who can help you to make a complaint