"NHS Grampian Handling Of My Complaint"

I previously posted on Care Opinion about the poor care I received from a psychiatrist at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary / Royal Cornhill Hospital. Rather than raise a complaint, I initially approached Information Governance to request correction of the many inaccuracies that had been documented about me. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen and, worse, even more errors were evident in their written response to me. Several times I offered evidence to prove these were errors, but my offers were repeatedly ignored. This is why I previously posted on Care Opinion. NHS Grampian responded to my post and advised me to lodge a formal complaint which I then did.

After considerable effort on my part, and by now suffering with anxiety and depression as a result of NHS Grampian’s intransigence, I thought the matter had at long last been resolved when, a year after lodging my formal complaint, my advocate and I were informed that all the psychiatrist’s letters had been retired. This outcome was written up and signed off by myself and the Service Manager (who acknowledged errors at that meeting).

To my shock, six months after this agreement, and without any prior discussion or explanation, I received a letter signed by the same Service Manager which indicated the psychiatrist’s letters had been reactivated. Although NHS Grampian had replaced some (but not all) of the psychiatrist’s letters with ones I’d annotated showing examples of errors, this was not the outcome previously agreed and implemented. It is also unacceptable because I don’t believe that a patient’s annotations will take precedence over the statements of a clinician. Nowhere in this letter was there even a hint of an apology. By now, over two years had elapsed since I first raised my concerns.

To make matters worse, NHS Grampian had previously acknowledged that the Information Governance response, showing the psychiatrist to have bedded down in their errors, was part of my complaint. Yet in the complaint outcome letter, the Service Manager referred me to this same Information Governance letter to find answers to my concerns. This seems a rather unique method of investigating a patient’s complaint: advise the patient they can find answers to their complaint in the very letter they are complaining about.

I have now spent almost 3 years of my life pursuing a complaint, thinking that eventually I’d achieved a satisfactory outcome, only to find it snatched away and my being more or less back at square one.

Earlier this year, I sent a letter to NHS Grampian expressing my deep concerns. In response to my request for a progress report, I recently received a holding letter – it is polite but explains they are prioritising other things and it asks me to be patient. There is no indication of when my complaint will be addressed or resolved. I would be sympathetic to pressures they may face were it not for the fact my complaint has been going on for 2-3 years and it had been resolved until NHS Grampian went back on the agreement. For how much longer do I have to be patient? My life has fallen apart as a result of that psychiatrist’s treatment of me back in 2020/21, and my anxiety / depression has been exacerbated due to NHS Grampian’s subsequent handling of my complaint. It seems that no-one involved in the matter cares about the devastation and distress that’s been caused to me. On occasions their behaviour might best be described as gaslighting. Yet again, I’m involving Care Opinion in the hope of progressing matters.