Last year, for our ‘GP complaints procedure report’, a Healthwatch Camden mystery shopper visited all of Camden’s GP practices to investigate how easy it is to make a complaint should a patient wish to do so.
We found out that a lot of practices had good complaints procedures in place but some needed improvement.
We wrote to every practice explaining what we found. In cases where improvement was needed, we recommended corrective action.
Recently we re-visited the practices where we made suggestions for changes. We wanted to see if our recommendations had been implemented.
In some cases we found that improvements had been made to the complaints system but in a few there was no change. We are currently taking action to encourage those practices to be more responsive.
The state of Camden’s GP services
In June of this year we’ll be issuing a report called ‘The state of Camden’s GP services. We’re working with a professional statistician to conduct our own analysis of the publicly available data on Camden’s GP surgeries and we’ve shared specific concerns with the Clinical Commissioning Group and/or Care Quality Commission. We will also be reporting on other aspects of GP services that we’ve been working on over the year.
Like everything we do, our aim in doing this follow-up report is to bring the voice and influence of local people to the development and delivery of local services.
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