Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust

4. Ms S complains about the care and treatment she received at the Trust in January 2022. Specifically, she says a community care nurse breached her confidentiality by giving information about her treatment to her parents, did not supply her medical reviews on time and failed to attend her medical reviews. She also complains staff at the Trust falsely imprisoned her and did not give her reasons for detaining her under the Mental Health Act 1983. Ms S also says she was neglected while on the ward and was not given a room with heating nor adequate clothing or bedding. Finally, Ms S complains staff at the Trust have defamed her character and allowed her to be assaulted and harassed.

5. Ms S says her time at the Trust led her to miss two weeks of university, which inconvenienced her and meant she missed important exams. Her time as a patient at the Trust also meant she could not attend job interviews, meaning she lost potential job opportunities and income. She also says staff breaching her confidentiality to her family members not only caused her and her son distress but also led to her being detained in hospital again, meaning she missed a family wedding. She says these events caused her son distress which has been long lasting. Finally, Ms S believes her mental health has been negatively affected by the Trust as they have added to the stressors in her life, rather than helping her with forms of support outside of medication.

6. Ms S would like service improvements at the Trust and reassurance staff at the Trust will keep her information confidential and use evidence, not hear-say, to make clinical decisions. Ms S is also seeking compensation.

9. We cannot investigate complaints brought to us after one year, unless we consider it reasonable to do so. When we receive a complaint, we consider if it is within our one-year time limit. This means we look at whether the complaint was passed to the PHSO within 12 months of when the complainant knew they had a reason to complain. If the complaint is outside of our time limit, we consider the reasons for this. Finally, we look at whether the reasons for the delay in coming to us were reasonable in the circumstances.

10. We have discussed Ms S’ complaint, and the circumstances around it, with her to understand why she did not bring the complaint to us sooner. We have also considered the time the Trust took to respond to Ms S.

11. We first considered when Ms S became aware of her reason to complain. Ms S recorded her date of awareness in her complaint form as 20 January 2022. We agree this is likely when Ms S knew she had a reason to complain, as January 2022 was the month when this period of care and treatment took place.

12. The gap between January 2022, Ms S’ date of knowledge and 25 November 2025, when we received evidence of the complaint responses, is three years and 11 months. This means, considering our one-year time limit, she is two years and 11 months out of time.

13. Ms S first complained about the care she received five months after this incident in May 2022. However, our records of contact with Ms S state her first complaint was made to the wrong Trust. We have email records on 27 October 2022 showing we signposted Ms S to an advocacy service to support her in making her complaint properly, and she was also given the correct email address for the complaints team at the correct Trust. We also reminded her of our own time limits and processes on this date.

14. Ms S officially submitted a complaint form to us on 16 November 2022. This was within our legal time limit. However, we can see on 24 November 2022 we declined her complaint because Ms S did not have any evidence at this point of a formal written response from the Trust. She was made aware of this by email and given instructions on her next steps should she still wish to bring the complaint to us.

15. We can also see Ms S called us to follow up on the progress of her complaint in May 2023 and we advised her to contact the Trust again by email asking for a response and to copy us in. We have no records from this point onwards that Ms S did this and, because we received no further communication from her regarding this complaint, the case remained closed on our system.

16. Ms S next contacted us in June 2025 when she made enquiries about a separate complaint she had made to us. As this was a different complaint about a different period of care, we cannot take this as evidence of Ms S trying to get the final responses we needed regarding her complaint about the care provided in January 2022 to us. We had also informed her in October and November 2022 that she needed to conclude the complaint’s process with the Trust before coming back to us.

17. In November 2025 Ms S brought this complaint up during a call about her other case, explaining her experience with the Trust in January 2022 and how much it has impacted her. At this point she was able to find evidence of the Trust’s written responses on our request and sent these to us.

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19. The first Trust response provided to us (dated 21 August 2023) signposts complainants to us if they are not satisfied with its final response to their complaint and would like to take the matter further.

20. This shows Ms S was signposted to us 1 year and 3 months before bringing the complaint up to us on the phone during a call about a different case, and this is a long unexplained gap. The complaint response we have seen also indicates Ms S knew the next step was to return to us with the Trust’s response in August 2023. She did not take this step until November 2025. We understand that by August 2023, which would be nearly 18 months after Ms S became aware of the problem, we may already have seen this complaint as being out of time and therefore unreasonable for us to investigate. However, sometimes we do consider cases which have been affected by delays in Trust responses and mitigating circumstances. Therefore, any effort from Ms S in August 2023 would have been appropriately assessed.

21. We then considered the second complaint response from the Trust which was received by Ms S on 15 January 2024. Again, we did not receive evidence of this response until November 2025, despite the Trust having sent Ms S another response to her complaint.

22. We have spoken with Ms S to clarify the timeline of events and her reasons for not bringing the complaint to us within our one-year time limit. These reasons have been considered when determining if we are able to set aside our time limit in this instance. Ms S explained to us that she was busy during the periods when she was not progressing her complaint with university, work and balancing other personal health and family matters. We know this will have been a difficult period for Ms S, and we have considered what she has told us carefully.

23. Ms S also told us that she had forgotten about the complaint and that she had 'put it on the backburner and given up on it'. This means Ms S made a choice not to progress the complaint, and we cannot consider this a barrier to her bringing it to us sooner. We can appreciate Ms S has told us she has had to balance her studies, work and other matters with bringing this complaint to us. She also told us that her advocate was unhelpful to her. However, we cannot see she has told us about any specific barriers which would cause us to put the time limit to one side.

24. We consider we offered Ms S support by giving her the email addresses for the complaints team at the correct Trust and signposting her to an advocacy service in October 2022. We understand she did take this advice, but we were not provided with a complaint response within time as a result.

25. Ms S was able to progress her complaint to the Trust, receiving responses in August 2023 and January 2024. We must therefore consider there were periods of time when she was able to progress her complaint, but she did not do so.

26. Whilst we appreciate how busy Ms S was, we also know she brought a separate complaint to us regarding care she received at another Trust in 2025 within time and knew the process to follow. She was also able to work and pursue university studies in this period. Therefore, we consider it is reasonable to conclude Ms S would have been capable of getting the older complaint to us much sooner than she did.

27. We have decided we cannot consider this matter further because the case is outside of our time limit. We understand this may be disappointing for Ms S, but we hope this statement helps assure her we only came to this decision after carefully considering every aspect of her complaint.

28. We wish Ms S all the best for the future.

1. We have carefully considered Ms S’ complaint about the Trust. We are sorry to hear about the events Ms S has complained about and appreciate her time at the Trust caused her significant distress.

2. We assure Ms S in reaching this decision we have carefully considered the concerns she raised. We recognise Ms S has experienced ongoing issues with this Trust. She has told us in detail how her experience at the Trust has affected her, and we are very sorry to hear of the distress and impact this had on her and her son. We have taken Ms S’ concerns seriously and have carefully considered them.

3. We have considered this complaint and feel we cannot put our time limit to one side. This is because we do not consider we have seen evidence of barriers to Ms S bringing her complaint to us sooner, and as such, cannot justify investigating this complaint further. We understand our decision will be disappointing for Ms S but hope that our decision set out below will go some way in helping her understand our reasoning.