Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to support NHS trusts to help tackle the root causes of recurring complaints.

The National Health Service should listen to, learn from, and act on issues that are raised in complaints to ensure services continually improve and that when things go wrong, problems are addressed and not repeated.

To support good complaint handling, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s NHS Complaint Standards and accompanying guidance set out how organisations providing services in the NHS should approach complaint handling, including the promotion of a learning culture that identifies and addresses recurring themes and issues.

We recognise that more needs to be done and through implementation of the 10-Year Health Plan, we will reform the NHS complaints process and strengthen the patient voice by setting clear standards for the quality of responses to complaints and to ensure the NHS listens carefully and compassionately, taking forward learnings to ensure high quality care. We will also increase the use of artificial intelligence tools to ensure complaints data is collected, and responded to, far more quickly.