3. Mrs A complains that the Trust did not take sufficient action to appropriately investigate her husband, Mr A’s, symptoms in March and May 2018. She told us on both occasions, her husband suffered from bleeds in his throat and mouth that were not appropriately investigated.
4. Mrs A says the Trust’s lack of action meant that when her husband suffered from another bleed in June 2018, it was fatal.
5. Mrs A would like an acknowledgement of failings and a financial remedy.
6. In September 2017 Mr A was diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer. He underwent treatment later that year.
7. In March 2018, Mr A was admitted to hospital with bleeding from his throat. The Trust discharged him home two days later.
8. In June, Mr A collapsed and was taken into hospital. He had a large blood clot in his throat. On 6 June, the Trust carried out a tracheostomy. This is an opening created at the front of the neck so a tube can be inserted into the windpipe to help a person breathe.
9. Mr A sadly died on 21 June 2018.
10. On 28 August 2018, Mrs A wrote to the Trust to complain about the care her husband had received. The Trust responded on 29 March 2019.
11. On 24 May, Mrs A complained again to the Trust. It responded for a second time on 10 September.
12. On 26 November Mrs A wrote to the Trust again. It replied to her concerns on 15 July and directed her to contact the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman if she remained dissatisfied with its response.
13. Mrs A wrote to us on 21 March 2021 and sent in a completed complaint form on 15 April.
16. The law says a person needs to make their complaint to us within a year of becoming aware of the problem. We cannot investigate complaints brought to us after one year, unless we consider there is a good reason. We have explored this with Mrs A to understand the reasons why she could not bring her complaint earlier. We have also considered the time the Trust took to respond to her.
17. We can see Mrs A’s complaint took two years and nine months to get to us. We do acknowledge that during this time there were long periods when Mrs A was waiting for responses from the Trust. The time taken by the Trust to respond was outside of Mrs A’s control, and we have put this time to one side when reaching our decision. We have identified two occasions when Mrs A did not pursue the complaint quickly and this led to a delay of four months.
18. We have also identified an eight month gap between when the Trust responded to Mrs A for the final time, and directed her to contact us, and when she brought her complaint to us. Mrs A has not been able to provide us with a reason for this delay, and we think she could have pursued her complaint more quickly.
19. We were sorry to hear of Mr A’s sudden death and we understand how important this complaint is to Mrs A. We recognise that our decision is not what she was hoping for, but we consider she could have brought her complaint to us sooner, particularly after she received the final response from the Trust, which directed her to our service. We have not seen good reason for us to put our time limit to one side and for this reason, we will not be taking further action.
1. We have carefully considered Mrs A’s complaint about the Trust. We have decided the complaint falls outside of our time limit.
2. We were very sorry to hear of Mr A’s sudden death, and we cannot begin to understand how distressing this must have been for Mrs A and her family.