Fighting dirty – Fit For the Future – 10 year health plan for England

The above quote is from page 89 of Fit for the Future – 10 year health plan for England it gives an insight into the quality of analysis  held by the writers of this report.

From a quick web search I think for the year 2023 the number of complaints referred to the health and rail service ombudsman were as follows:

Rail – 4.4k

Health – 37k

On the surface the assertion in the quote is about right.

However, these are tiny figures. There are something like 600m patient contacts in the NHS in England every year, and about 1.6bn passenger journeys on the railways in the UK. 

You can only be referred to the Ombudsman if you have already complained to the organisation concerned and it could not solve your problem. I suspect because train complaints are simpler a greater proportion will be resolved by the company concerned.

Although about 3 times more people use rail every year compared to using the NHS we are not comparing like with like here.

1. Compared to the NHS rail has relatively few organisations involved – roughly 30 compared to approximately 4,000 NHS organisations including trusts, ambulance services, dentists etc etc.
2. These figures show the number of referred complaints – they are not an indication of the number of complaints that were accepted as valid by the Ombudsman or the number of complaints received and resolved by the receiving provider.
3. Thank goodness people complain about their NHS. Our health is central to who we are. Complaints will include those from people who are upset and frightened. This is a completely different order to peoples experience of trains. We probably want more complaints rather than fewer ones.
4. The human body and its ailments are a bit more complicated than trains. We built trains, we know how they work. We didn’t build people – any clinician worth their salt will tell you that we do not know everything about illness and its cures. Yet, many of us who use services look to clinicians to have definitive answers – this is often not possible.

To conclude

You may say – ‘why is he worried about 20 or so words in a 169 page report?’

This soundbite phrase in a serious report is an indication of the poor quality of the thinking and analysis of the people who wrote this document and regrettably follows through to other more serious proposals in the document as a whole. Which I will try to comment on soon.

I think this specious soundbite is there to justify some of the proposals in the report by painting a picture of organisational incompetence in the NHS.

That is shameful.

What do you think?