Patient advice and liaison service / complaints

There is currently unprecedented demand on our Patient Services Team (PALS & Complaints).

All telephone calls are being diverted to our answering service for callers to leave a message.  Calls will be returned, and emails will be responded to by a member of the team as soon as possible, but there will be a delay due to high demand at this time.  There is no need to leave a further message or send a further email, you will receive a response as soon as we are able to do so. 

We apologise for the delay and thank you for your patience during this time.

Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS)

The Patient Advice and Liaison Service (or PALS) is a free, informal, confidential help and advice service for patients, carers and their families. It is there to help when you need advice or have concerns about health-related matters or simply don’t know where to turn.

The ICB PALS can help with questions about the ICB.  If you have any questions about other NHS providers or services, you will need to contact that organisation directly who will be able to assist you.

PALS will:

• help you get the information you need about the ICB
• listen and respond to your concerns, suggestions, queries or compliments
• sort out problems quickly on your behalf in an informal and friendly manner
• use your feedback to help improve services
• tell you how to get more involved in your own healthcare
• help you to make a formal complaint
• signpost you to other agencies or organisations who can assist you.
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Some useful contact information for local providers is shown below:

The Royal Stoke Hospital or Stafford County Hospital – [email protected] or call 01782 676450

Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust – [email protected] or call 0800 783 2865

North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare NHS Trust – [email protected] or call 01782 275031 / 0800 389 9676

Queen’s Hospital Burton or Derby Royal Hospital – [email protected] or call 01283 593110 / 01283 593182

For queries relating to your GP or any other NHS provider, please contact the service directly.

The ICB website also contains useful information about services and commissioning, and you may wish to review this before contacting PALS.

If you wish to contact the ICB, please contact us via one of the methods below and we will be happy to help.

Freephone: 0808 196 8861

Email: [email protected]

PALS is open from 9.00 am to 4.00 pm Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays).

Any information will be treated in confidence. We may need to collect personal information from you to help provide the best possible service, but we will not share your details with anyone without your consent.

Complaints

We are committed to ensuring that we deliver high quality, safe, effective, patient-focused care through the services we provide. We want to hear about your experience of using local health services.

If you have not received a good service, we need to know about it. If you are unhappy with your NHS care or treatment, or how you were dealt with, you have the right to make a complaint.

NHS staff work hard to get things right, but sometimes things don’t go as well as we would like them to. If you are unhappy with our services, or the care you have received, please let us know so that we can try to put things right. Your feedback will help us to learn and improve services to help prevent any future issues.

Complaints should be raised either with the provider of the service, or with the commissioner of the service, but cannot be raised with both.  If you have already raised your complaint with the organisation who provided your care, the ICB will be unable to investigate this again and you will need to direct any outstanding concerns back to the organisation who provided your response or pursue Stage 2 of the complaints process with the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO).

Compliments

We would also love to hear from you if things went well, so please let us know if you have any feedback or compliments relating to our services.

Complaints and AI (Artificial Intelligence)

It is important that we hear about your complaint in your own words. We know some people find Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT helpful when submitting a complaint, but please be aware that AI-generated content can sometimes make complaints too complicated or include legal references that are not relevant. This may increase the time it takes us to review your complaint, or we may need to ask you to resubmit it in your own words. We follow the Parliamentary Health Service Ombudsman – Good Complaint Handling standards. Information about using AI to raise a complaint, has been taken from their guidance.

When you bring a complaint to us, we need to understand your personal experience and how the issues have affected you. Simple, clear language that explains what happened to you will always be more helpful than complicated, formal writing.

We know some people find AI tools useful to support with their writing. It is important to remember the risks of sharing your information with AI tools. Providers of these tools may use it to train their AI systems and may process it in different countries. Avoid entering sensitive personal information unless you are confident about how it will be used and protected.

Here are some suggestions to get the best results from AI tools while making sure it still sounds like you and your complaint:

• Keep your prompts focused on your experience and how it made you feel. A prompt is a question or instruction that you type into an AI tool to tell it what you want help with. You can use these examples (from the PHSO website) of  useful AI prompts to help with your complaint
• Do not ask AI to add legal arguments, use formal legal language or reference laws to try and make your complaint sound more ‘official’.
• It is important to check any AI-generated text to make sure it reflects your own personal experience and contains accurate facts.