mr complainy

I feel I should say a little more about complaints; not the latest, as that would not be fair to the complainant, but in general.

On average I get 2 or 3 complaints a year, usually about my attitude (and not, thankfully, about my clinical skills). That means that about 1 in every 3-4000 customers leaves my surgery sufficiently unhappy about the treatment they have had at my hands to take it further. Usually a humble apology suffices (though not always)and we move on. Only very rarely does a patient leave the practice as a consequence, or takes the complaint further. In the latter case, and over the years there have been a few, the local PCT has always found "no case to answer", perhaps because as no one else is present during the consultation, it is impossible to ascertain exactly what happened. After a complaint about my attitude i always resolve to improve my record, though I expect to continue having occasional complaints about my approach for the remainder of my career.

The question I ask myself is, if I fail in my duty of respect once every three thousand cases, but am actually better (or certainly no worse) than the average GP in the remaining 2999, how bad is that? My approach is very much "no nonsense, call it as you see it", and I concede that it doesn't suit everybody. But in any given year, how do I rate with my peers? I know some doctors (my esteemed partner, for instance) who don't get a single complaint from one year's end to the next, while others get complaints made against them nearly every month, sometimes of a much more serious nature than the ones I have to field.

Bottom line: patients do not leave in droves; in fact the list size has grown year-on-year ever since I became a fully fledged partner back in the late 1970s. So I must be doing something right...