When Patients Complain

Patient complaints are a fact of life for all medical professionals. Whether you're currently dealing with a complaint or you want to know how to prepare yourself for the eventuality, this book will provide you with practical guidance on how best to protect yourself. Using real life examples to put complaints into context, this book will allow you to better understand how they occur, how they progress and the best way to resolve them.

Mike Ebdy spent nineteen years as Complaints Director for his local out of hours service. Along with supporting patients, he has helped countless GPs though extremely difficult cases (including some of his own) and has developed an acute understanding of how complaints develop and the best approaches to mitigating and resolving them. If you practise medicine, you will receive complaints and while the process will be stressful and frightening, it is important to remember you are not alone.

Taken from foreword by Clare Gerada:

This book is the first time I have seen so clearly laid out the impact of complaints but perhaps more importantly what to do when that complaint lands in our in-box. The chapters are practical, informative and written with such compassion that one could imagine Dr Mike Ebdy sitting alongside as you try to deal with the emotional impact of a complaint. He covers such ground in this little book. From what complaints arise to the steps you should take once you receive one, to how to reduce the risks of receiving a complaint and importantly how to care for yourself if (or indeed when) you get one. He even manages to reserve a chapter about the beneficial effects of complaints and how we should learn from them in the hope of improving patient care. This book therefore has everything for everyone - certainly with respect to complaints and packs a massive punch of knowledge into a little book. The book will certainly help our profession who are caught up in the pain of complaints, and I imagine it will even save lives.

Table of contents:

• Chapter one: Obligations
• Chapter two: How complaints arise
• Chapter three: Types of complaint
• Chapter four: How to respond
• Chapter five: Shall we have a meeting?
• Chapter six: Protecting yourself and reducing complaints
• Chapter seven: Looking after yourself
• Chapter eight: Finding positives in complaints
• References
• Useful websites