12. 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 do so. We have discussed this with Mr T to understand the reasons why he could not do so.
13. Mr N is complaining about the Trust’s decision to prescribe him sertraline on 2 March 2022. We consider Mr N and his father knew about the matters complained about on 6 March 2022. This is because we know Mr T raised his concerns about the medication with the Trust on that date. To meet our time limit for looking at a complaint, we would have expected him to bring the complaint to us by March 2023. He brought the complaint to us on 23 July 2024, one year four months later.
14. We asked Mr T why he did not bring the complaint to us sooner. He told us initially the Trust said it would carry out a Serious Incident Investigation. It shared its report on 16 November 2022. Mr T says he contacted the Trust to dispute the investigation findings in December 2022.
15. He told us once he had received a response from the Trust he contacted a solicitor who was representing his son in February 2023. He said the solicitor told him that psychiatrists would not support the view that sertraline caused the change in Mr N’s behaviour which led to the incident on 2 March 2022. At this point he decided he would no longer pursue his concerns.
16. Mr T has told us he then found studies which show a link between sertraline and psychosis. He says this prompted him to make a complaint to the Trust and he did this on 4 April 2024. He received a final response from the Trust on 11 June 2024 which directed him to contact us if he remained dissatisfied.
17. Mr T told us he received a letter from Mr N’s responsible clinician on 28 June 2024 and states this email contained new information that conflicts with previous communications from the Trust. This email prompted Mr T to complain to us in July 2024.
18. Mr T explained he believes the date of awareness should be when they became aware of new information in June 2024. Mr T also expressed that as Mr N has been detained since 2022 the time limit for bringing a complaint should have stopped from then.
19. We recognise Mr T believes the circumstances he has explained should allow for us to investigate the complaint. When we look at whether we should investigate a complaint we look at the first point someone had cause to complain. In this case Mr T had cause to complain on 6 March 2022.
20. We recognise Mr T considers the issue he has brought to us to be different to the one he complained about in 2022, and he has told us he only became aware of this information in June 2024. We consider the central issue of his complaint is how Trust prescribed sertraline to Mr N in 2022.We have not seen that this new information changes that Mr T knew there was cause to complain about this from March 2022.
21. We find Mr T could have brought his complaint to us following the Trust response letter in December 2022. We have not seen that the advice given by Mr N’s solicitors was a barrier to Mr T raising a complaint with us sooner.
22. We recognise that Mr N is unable to bring complaints himself. Mr T has acted as his representative since before the incident in 2022 and has made complaints to the Trust on his behalf. We have not seen that Mr N’s circumstances prevented a complaint being made to us by his father following their dissatisfaction with the Trust’s response in December 2022.
23. Taking into account the evidence we have seen we do not consider we should put our time limit to one side.
24. We do not doubt how significantly this experience has impacted Mr N and recognise how important this complaint is to him. Although our decision may be disappointing, we hope Mr N is assured that we have carefully considered his explanations of delay and have explained our decision clearly.