Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

3. Mrs A complains about a series of operations done at the Trust in 2020 to correct a problem with reflux. She feels these operations failed and left her in a worse condition than before.

4. Mrs A says the Trust’s actions changed her life completely and she is now unable to live a normal life. She says she now has to stay at home all day and cannot work. She says she has been affected emotionally and physically, and she has had severe weight loss as a result. She also says it had a financial impact, as her husband had to take sole responsibility for their financial affairs.

5. Mrs A wants the Trust to accept some responsibility for what happened, and she also wants financial compensation.

6. Mrs A had been suffering with choking from solids and fluids for approximately five years. After several assessments with specialists at the Trust, it agreed to perform a laparoscopic fundoplication (antireflux stomach surgery) to attempt to correct the issue. The Trust did the operation on 12 March 2020.

7. Mrs A continued to have difficulty swallowing and increased dehydration in the days after the procedure. She had to have two more operations over the following two weeks to relieve her symptoms.

8. Over the next eight months, Mrs A’s continued difficulty with swallowing caused her to struggle with eating, plus she experienced weight loss and low energy levels. A further series of tests did not identify any problems with the operations. In November 2020, she decided to undergo revision surgery to reverse the original procedure. This happened on 16 December 2020.

9. She made a formal complaint to the Trust on 13 November 2020, shortly before her final surgery. She received a response on 23 April 2021, but this did not fully address all her concerns. She went back to the Trust with further questions and received an additional response on 16 August 2021. This response addressed all her outstanding concerns.

11. The HSCA says a person needs to make their complaint to us within a year of becoming aware they had a reason to complain. We cannot investigate complaints brought to us after one year unless we consider there is a good reason to do so. We have discussed this with Mrs A to understand the reasons why she did not complain to us sooner. We have also considered the time the Trust took to respond to Mrs A’s complaint.

12. We understand Mrs A was aware of all her concerns by November 2020. It was at this point she complained to the Trust. Mrs A brought her complaint to us on this occasion in August 2022. This means her complaint was made nine months outside our time limit, because she came to us a year and nine months after she became aware of her concerns.

13. Mrs A first brought her complaint to us in September 2021. That was after she received a final response from the Trust. The Trust’s complaint process had taken a total of nine months to issue two responses, with the final response coming on 16 August 2021. She contacted us very soon after that.

14. Mrs A spoke to us over the telephone in September 2021. She followed this conversation with an email to which she attached images of letters she had sent and received from the Trust. We responded to this email with a phone call on 21 September 2021 to explain that the attachments she had provided were illegible.

15. We emailed Mrs A with a copy of our complaint form, which we asked her to complete and send back to us with fresh copies of the illegible images.

16. There is no record of Mrs A providing the illegible information again. There is also no record of her responding to the email we sent her with the complaint form. We specifically asked Mrs A about this when we clarified her complaint by telephone. She told us she had no recollection of receiving or replying to this email, or of resending illegible evidence.

17. It is not clear from the notes of the telephone conversation whether we explained our time limit to Mrs A. However, we sent clear instructions that her complaint was not ready for us and that she would need to send us some more information before we could consider it. Our complaint form also explains the HSCA says a complaint should be brought to us within a year of the complainant becoming aware of the problem.

18. Following her original contact, we did not hear from Mrs A until 29 July 2022, when she emailed us asking for an update on her complaint. This means there was a ten-month delay with Mrs A taking action to progress her complaint.

19. She told us she was under the impression that we were already dealing with the complaint.

20. She also told us that she spent some time as an inpatient at the Trust’s neurology service for a series of tests because she gets forgetful about certain things. We asked her for more detail about this in a subsequent phone call. She said she was referred to the neurology service as she had been suffering with persistent headaches. She thought this may have been a reaction to the medication she was taking, but she had a series of tests to try to identify the issue between 13 and 18 July 2021.

21. We have thought carefully about this explanation as part of our time consideration. We have also taken into account she told us she gets forgetful. Mrs A’s admission to the Trust’s neurology service took place before she originally contacted us about her complaint. The tests failed to diagnose a neurological cause for her headaches. Without a confirmed diagnosis, we cannot see that this contributed to the ten-month delay in her contacting us to pursue her complaint.

22. Mrs A was still not happy with how the Trust had dealt with her complaint after two responses. She was aware she could bring the complaint to us, as he had contacted us to discuss it. We explained what we needed to take the complaint forward, but Mrs A took a further ten months to come back to us.

23. The explanations Mrs A has given us do not justify this delay. We consider she could have fully brought the complaint back to us sooner than July 2022.

24. The Trust’s complaint handling took around nine months in total. We have taken that into account in our consideration. It is not an uncommonly long time for an organisation to provide two complaint responses. As we have explained above, the delay with Mrs A bringing the complaint to us with all the necessary information was ten months, which is longer than the Trust took to handle her complaints. The time the Trust took is not a strong reason to put the time limit to one side in this case.

Summary

25. This complaint is outside our time limit by around nine months. The delay on Mrs A’s part was around ten months. We have considered the time the Trust’s complaints process took and the explanations Mrs A has given for the delays. There are no strong reasons for putting our time limit to one side.

26. It is important we consider and act within the HSCA, and we regret any further upset this decision may cause. We thank Mrs A for bringing her complaint to us, and we hope this statement clearly explains the reasons why we will not be considering this complaint any further.

1. We have carefully considered Mrs A’s complaint about the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (the Trust). We have decided not to consider it further. This is because the complaint falls outside our time limit. We do not think it would be reasonable to put the time limit to one side.

2. We accept how important Mrs A’s complaint is. She says she had operations that failed and caused an impact on her daily life. We are sorry to hear about this and recognise she has had a very difficult experience. We also appreciate our decision may be disappointing to her.