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KO14b return – My complaints! By Nicola Davies

By Nicola Davies

I’ve just had the joy that is the new complaints spreadsheet return. Well, there’s an hour or two of my life that I won’t get back. What a complete load of old tosh!

As a relic of primary care, I’m used to form-filling, tick-boxing, filling out endless surveys… and I appreciate that there is a need to evaluate complaints, look at what we did, why there was the complaint, but the old system of the total number and how many were admin versus clinical was easy.

It was a quick return that didn’t take too long – it was filled in, signed, scanned and sent, leaving me free to move on to other (more important) things. I’m not a fan, have you noticed?

I understand that it is necessary to whittle down your complaints into little compartments, deciding whether the admin complaint was about a prescription (an error, the wrong drug, the wrong dosage or just a delay in generating) or whether it was about surgery opening times, or the fact that your receptionist might have had a cob on that day and was particularly Draconian, but if I’m filling in any spreadsheet, I’d really like to be able to see the whole spreadsheet on one screen – call me old-fashioned!

The new KO14b (doesn’t THAT just roll off the tongue) had 84 columns, yes 84, how old was the patient? Where did it happen? What treatment classification? Admin error? Appointment availability (including phoning in), and so the list went on, and on, and on…

The spreadsheet does cover everyone – so treatment centres, NHS111, prisons/detention centres can all use the same one – and at least then some poor soul somewhere can sit at their PC and calculate ALL of the figures to find out how awful we all are across the gamut of NHS services because, let’s be honest here, no-one is asking us for our ‘compliments’ figures are they?   The number of letters and cards we get from patients and their families (and some tourists!) outweighs the number of complaints we have – which is great. However, nobody ever wants to hear how good you are at something, or how well you treated a patient, or how grateful someone was when you went over and above the call of duty to help them out, because that’s just not British enough is it?

We’re all for hearing the worst. Jeremy Vine gets the rough end of my tongue if he ever has a session on GP surgeries – because you only ever get to hear one side – and I sit in my car, shouting at the radio like some mad woman. You can imagine, can’t you? They’re complaining they can’t get an appointment for four days, but fail to give the full story… “Actually, Jeremy, I really just wanted to be seen because I’ve had this ingrowing toenail for two days and I can’t get my Jimmy Choo’s on” or ”I wanted this growth seeing to on my hand but the receptionist said no”,  when we know that what was actually requested was an appointment for cautery to a wart which we no longer do, and in any case, it definitely isn’t urgent – even if we did do it!

And we all know, if you have a bad experience somewhere, you tell 10 people – but a great experience, and you’ll only tell one person! Think about the last time you had a good or bad experience at a restaurant – it’s rare that we share the good stuff – and we flippin’ well ought to!

Not content with having to tick all of these boxes, there was still the issue of submitting it online. The damn thing wouldn’t go through first time via the web-page link we were given. Mine came back twice with errors – I had managed to leave a box blank when it needed a zero (sackable offence probably) and then it wouldn’t go, probably because the site couldn’t cope. So, I put it down, went back to it, tried again – and again, and then finally it did work – but what a complete pain in the backside! Interestingly, there is no column to tick for “How many times did you try to submit this and fail?

On the plus side, it’s only once a year and if it went really well, what would I have to complain about?!

By Nicola Davies

Helpful: You can now quickly and easily log, update and track your complaints throughout the year with the new KO14b Complaints Log Toolkit [PLUS]

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Rating

Nicola Davies

Practice Manager regularly ranting about the NHS. 35 years in Primary Care and still getting irritated by constant change for change sake! West Country Women Awards Nominee 2022 https://westcountrywomenawards.co.uk/

View all posts by Nicola Davies
10 Responses to “KO14b return – My complaints! By Nicola Davies”
  1. janice Phillips Says:

    I completely agree with everything you said. This was without doubt the worse most incompetent form I have every had the pleasure of filling out. It was the biggest waste of time!

    Reply

  2. Jane Dalgleish Says:

    I couldn’t agree more on the KO14b – I have never seen such a pathetic spreadsheet in my life. My dog could have created a more sophisticated one. AND it got bounced 4 times before I got it right because there’s no proper explanation of what the columns mean.

    Reply

  3. Elaine Dawkins Says:

    Well done for only getting it rejected twice. I managed to clock up a record 6 rejections!!! I agree, a complete load of TOSH, call that a spreadsheet!!!

    Reply

  4. sangeeta pattni Says:

    I completely agree with Nicola worst ever experience of electronic submission and so glad that I am not the only one who felt the same way!! BTW I had to submit it a number of times until it finally got accepted!!!!! What a waste of PM time…….

    Reply

  5. Lucy Varghese Says:

    Someone somewhere is thinking how can we make things complicated for GP Practice Managers???

    Obviously they thought just putting a few numbers in the right boxes was too easy!!!

    bring back the old Primary care Webtool

    Reply

  6. Gerry Barclay Says:

    I felt compelled to send an e-mail to NHS Digital and ask if they had now employed a 12 yr old to come up with their surveys as it was as much use to PMs as a chocolate fireguard! I didn’t get a reply, how rude!

    After much coxing by the CCG, I eventually deigned to attempt it (I knew of another PM who had 9 attempts to complete and upload it), I said 1 go and if it doesn’t work they can stick it where the sun don’t shine! I think the system picked up my general demeanour and it worked first time – I still wrote another review to say it was pointless and how I loved the 84 column single line method of info collection (Not).

    Lets hope they can progress to some 16 yr olds next year to come up with a better system 🙂

    Reply

  7. Amanda Says:

    I completely agree. I had 8 complaints to complete, on the first run I had 84 anomalies on the sheet, because you have to add a 0 if you have nothing to add. As the spreadsheet is so long you had to keep scrolling across the screen, not user friendly at all and time consuming, which is what we are in short supply of!

    Reply

  8. Jan Says:

    Couldn’t agree more Nicola. I only had 7 complaints to deal with but it took me an hour and a half to log in and work out exactly what they wanted from me to enter on a stupid spreadsheet…

    Do they actually test these systems before they share them?

    Primitive doesn’t cover it…..

    Reply

  9. deborah Says:

    why does it always mean more work you just master one system and then it becomes three more I found it so time consuming

    Reply

  10. rattandeep Sahota Says:

    I agree with Jane Dalgleish and everyone else completely. My dog is equally competent and better qualified than the lot who designed this one. I hope this was just one off experience for us.

    Reply

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