3. Mrs O complains about the care and treatment she had from the Practice in June 2021.
4. Mrs O says the Practice gave her misleading information before having treatment on her tooth. She says she would not have gone through with treatment if she had been given the correct information. She says this led to her losing a tooth, having ongoing discomfort and psychological damage.
5. Mrs O would like the Practice to apologise and pay financial compensation.
8. 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.
9. We have discussed this with Mrs O to understand the reasons why she could not complain sooner. We also considered the time NHS England and the Practice took to reply to Mrs O’s complaints.
10. Mrs O told us she was aware of the problem in June 2021 when she had her treatment. This means to be within our time limit she needed to come to us by June 2022. Mrs O brought her complaint to us on 24 February 2023. Her complaint is eight months outside our time limit.
11. Mrs O complained to NHS England on 14 November 2022, one year and five months after getting treatment from the Practice. The complaints team at NHS England contacted Mrs O a day later and she agreed for the complaint to be passed to the Practice to deal with. The Practice sent its complaint to Mrs O on 13 December 2022.
12. Because of the delay in Mrs O complaining to NHS England, her complaint was already out of time before she began the local complaints process. NHS England replied one day later, and the Practice gave its response within one month. NHS England replied to Mrs A’s next contact within one week. The time it took to try to resolve things locally is not the reason the complaint is out of time.
13. Mrs O explained her mother died around this time and she was grieving. She also told us she had three medical procedures herself around the time of the treatment and her husband became unwell two years later in July 2022. We are sorry to hear about the death of her mother and the health scares the family experienced. We are pleased they are now in good health.
14. We understand the difficulties Mrs O faced around the time she had treatment from the Practice. But there was a 15 month delay in making the complaint and this is a significant amount of time.
15. Having considered Mrs O’s reasons for the delay and the time taken for the local complaint process to be completed, we have not seen good reason to set our time limit aside. There was a large gap where Mrs O was able to complain to us after having dental treatment, but she did not.
16. It is important we consider and act within the law and we regret any further upset this decision may cause. We hope this statement clearly explains the reasons why we will not be considering the complaint further.
1. The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman has carefully considered Mrs O’s complaint about a dental practice in the Croydon area (the Practice). We are very sorry to hear about her experience. Mrs O told us she has lost a tooth and continues to experience physical pain and emotional distress since her appointment at the Practice. We recognise Mrs O has been through a distressing time.
2. We have decided to take no further action because Mrs O’s complaint falls outside our 12 month time limit.