THE HSE’s Patient Advocacy Service heard from people wanting to make complaints about 238 issues concerning their own or a loved one’s experience of dealing with University Hospital Limerick.
The nature of the main complaints ranged from concerns at not being able to visit people in hospital to patient information being ignored, a spokesman for the service told the Limerick Post.
The various complaints were made by 64 individuals.
The Patient Advocacy Service is an independent, free and confidential service that provides information and support to people who want to make a complaint about an experience they have had in a public acute hospital or HSE-operated nursing home.
In 2021, the Patient Advocacy Service provided support to 1,205 people in Ireland who wished to make a complaint about their care in a public acute hospital, covering 3,382 separate complaint issues.
64 of these people contacted the Patient Advocacy Service to seek information regarding making a complaint about the care they received in University Hospital Limerick (UHL).
A spokesman told the Limerick Post, “The Patient Advocacy Service provides empowerment advocacy support, so in many cases the provision of information by our Advocates is sufficient for individuals to make their own complaint.
“Therefore, we are unable to give a clear figure of how many of these queries resulted in a complaint to UHL,” he explained.
The service was contacted about anxieties acknowledged by staff but not addressed in 32 cases; visiting being unavailable in 20 cases; staff failing to communicate care plans in 14 cases; difficulty phoning a particular healthcare unit in 11 cases and pateints not being monitored properly in ten cases.
There were seven cases involving rude behaviour; patient information being dismissed by staff; complaints not responded to; clinicians overlooking information; phone calls not returned and staff speaking in a condescending manner.
In response to the complaints, a hospital spokesman said: “The numbers of people who contacted the HSE Patient Advocacy Service about UHL amounts to just over five per cent of those who contacted the service about their care in public acute hospitals.
“However, our wish would be to reduce this number to zero.”
He said the hospital has recruited additional members to the Hospitals Group Patient Advocacy Liaison Service (PALS), and representatives have, for the first time, been specifically assigned to the Emergency Department.
“We are in the process of recruiting a dedicated complaints manager for the group,” the spokesman added.
“We have established a Patient Experience Steering Committee across the UL Hospitals Group and are in the process of setting up sub-groups on all sites. The focus of these sub-groups will be to learn from the complaints and inpatient feedback and implement recommendations to improve the patients experience of our service.
“We are actively working on the findings from the National Inpatient Experience Survey completed by the Helath Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) in 2021 and are preparing for the launch of the 2022 survey in May”, he addd.
Patients and families can also complain via ‘ Your Service Your Say’ at yoursay@hse.ie
