Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

3. Mr X complains on behalf of his wife Mrs A about the misdiagnosis of her right foot pain by the Trust’s Haematology team between June 2022 and November 2022. Mr X complains there was a delay in diagnosing and treating an arterial blood clot in Mrs A’s right foot. He also says there was a delay in her receiving angioplasty treatment for the blood clot.

4. Mr X says that these errors resulted in a prolonged hospital stay for his wife, which led to her experiencing complications and may have contributed to her death at that time.

5. Mr X would like the Trust to recognise it made mistakes in the care and treatment it provided to his wife.

7.The Act, which gives us our powers to consider complaints, 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 can see that Mr X became aware of cause for complaint in November 2022 and complained to us in November 2024. This means his complaint is one year outside of our limit.

8.We have therefore discussed this with Mr X to understand the reasons he could not have complained to us sooner. We have also considered the time the Trust took to respond to Mr X.

9.Mr X became aware in November 2022 of concerns that Mrs A’s right foot pain had been misdiagnosed as a side effect of chemotherapy. This is because she received a different diagnosis of arterial thrombosis in this foot in November 2022, which was the cause of her pain. Mrs A subsequently received treatment for the condition in December 2022.

10.Mr X complained about this to the Trust 18 months later, in May 2024. The Trust provided a complaint response in October 2024 and Mr X brought his complaint to us in November 2024. Therefore, we received the complaint 24 months from the date Mr X was aware of the problem.

11.We asked Mr X the reason for not making the complaint to us within 12 months of being aware of the issue. Mr X explained he had suspicions about Mrs A’s care but he was suffering with grief and depression after her death. He tells us this caused a delay in requesting her medical notes and making a complaint.

12.We fully recognise that Mr X was deeply affected by the loss of his wife and this was clearly a very difficult time for him. Our decision is in no way intended to suggest otherwise. In considering our time limit we have thought only about whether this meant he was unable to complain sooner.

13. We can see that Mr X submitted a complaint to another organisation regarding a different aspect of Mrs A’s care six months after her death. As he was able to complain to another organisation, we can see there was no barrier to him complaining to the Trust on this matter too. We know he went on to request Mrs A’s medical records and make a complaint after he had reviewed them, but we cannot see he was unable to raise his concerns significantly sooner, as he was already aware in November 2022 that he believed something was wrong and there is no obligation to request medical records before beginning the complaints process.

14. With the above in mind, we have not seen reasons that might allow us to put the time limit to one side and so we will take no further action with this complaint. We appreciate this will be disappointing news to Mr X, and we thank him for giving us the opportunity to consider his concerns.

1. We have carefully considered Mr X’s complaint about Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (the Trust), which he has raised on behalf of his late wife, Mrs A. We are very sorry to hear about the circumstances of Mr X’s complaint and the sad loss of his wife.

2. Having thought about the information available to us, we can see that this complaint falls outside of our one-year time limit, and we have not seen there is good reason for us to put our time limit aside to consider it further. This means we will take no further action, and we explain below how we reached this decision.