13. Before we can look into the concerns someone has raised, we have to check their complaint passes our primary tests. These are set out in the law that covers our work.
14. 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 to. We have discussed this with Mrs N to understand the reasons why she could not come to us sooner. We have also considered the time the Trust took to respond to her complaint.
15. Mrs N is complaining about the care Mrs V received during her hospital admission in 2020. Her key concern is about the patch applied by the Trust on 20 March 2020. She says her sister raised concerns on 22 March which resulted in the Trust recording the incident on Datix (a risk management information system).
16. The family made a formal complaint on 19 June 2020, approximately three months later. We consider the three months it took to make the first complaint is not too much time as the family had been grieving after Mrs V’s death. Mrs N’s sister told us she had to take six months off work due to the impact of her bereavement. We understand how difficult this must have been for the family.
17. The Trust’s first complaint response is dated 29 September 2020. This means it took the Trust just over three months to respond. We do not consider this a significant period of time because the NHS Complaints Regulations say organisations should respond within six months.
18. Mrs N returned to the Trust to raise outstanding concerns in mid-November 2020. This was approximately six weeks after getting the response. Given Mrs N has described having to discuss the response with her family, we consider six weeks was a reasonable period of time to review and reflect on it.
19. The Trust’s final response is dated 22 June 2021. This means it took just over seven months to respond to the follow-up correspondence. This is longer than the six month period set out in the NHS Complaints Regulations, so there is evidence of a potential relatively short delay on the Trust’s part.
20. The Trust’s complaint handling accounts for approximately ten and a half months in total. As we have explained, most of this is reasonable.
21. The final response directs Mrs N to come to us and mentioned ‘it is important you make your complaint as soon as you receive our [the Trust’s] final response as there are time limits for the Ombudsman to look into complaints’. Mrs N contacted us about four and a half months after getting the final response. This could be considered to be an unexplained delay.
22. We appreciate Mrs N needed to liaise with her family and lockdown restrictions made this more difficult. By the time the Trust sent its final response, restrictions on social contact between households had been eased. Most legal limits on social contact were then removed on 19 July and there were no further restrictions until December. Mrs N had already contacted us by that point.
23. Considering this information, our view is there was a delay here. Had Mrs N approached us right after getting the final response, her complaint would have been approximately three months outside of our time limit. We would have been more likely to use our discretion then or soon after and put our time limit to one side.
24. Instead, when Mrs N brought her complaint to us in early November 2021, it was about seven and a half months outside of our time limit.
25. The gaps in the timeline linked to Mrs N progressing her complaint account for about seven months. Of this, the delay is linked to the four-and-a-half-month period between Mrs N getting the Trust’s final response and contacting us. After considering the timeline, we cannot justify using our discretion and putting our time limit to one side.
26. Unfortunately, this means we are unable to look into Mrs N’s concerns in the way she and her family wanted us to. We would like to offer our condolences for their loss and thank them for bringing their complaint to us.