Healthcare Complaints Resolution Support

Complaint management services for NHS and independent health and social care which help you deliver performance improvements across your organisation

Resolving Complaints About Your Healthcare Organisation

Healthcare is inherently complex, and even the most dedicated teams face situations where things go wrong. Patient complaints are unavoidable, but how you handle them defines your organisation.

Verita helps healthcare providers transform these challenging moments into robust, systems-based learning that protects patients and improves care.

As the number of complaints hospitals receive increase, so do the demands on resources to address them. We work with NHS and independent healthcare providers to improve complaints management systems to resolve backlogs, maintain patient trust, and avoid unwanted media attention.

If you need help resolving a complaint about patient care, support with clearing a backlog of complaints, or need to provide complaints handling training to your internal teams, please book a free consultation or simply call us on 020 7494 5670.

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CQC Statutory Requirements

Effective complaints handling preserves public confidence in services – confidence that can be significantly damaged when things go wrong. In particular, NHS providers need to meet CQC requirements for organisations to make sure that they have an “effective and accessible” complaints system (Regulation 16) in place.

Under Regulation 16 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014, all registered providers face strict statutory obligations to operate an effective, accessible system for identifying, receiving, recording, and responding to complaints. Under the CQC’s assessment framework, complaints handling is a core indicator of an organisation’s “Learning Culture” and “Responsiveness.”

Serious or systemic failures to meet these standards can result in severe regulatory penalties, including formal Warning Notices, the suspension or cancellation of services, a downgrade in quality ratings, or even criminal prosecution.

It is the legal responsibility of the healthcare provider to maintain adequate provision for impartial complaint resolution. Neglecting this framework not only triggers CQC intervention but also escalates legal and reputational risks, as unresolved concerns are inevitably passed to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) or channelled into clinical negligence claims.

We can help you navigate CQC regulations, clear complex backlogs, and build a compliant, learning-focused complaints framework that protects both your patients and your organisation.

Complaints resolution support from Verita

Complaints are a source of learning and can provide information for improvement. In addition they may serve as a good ‘barometer’ as they can provide insight into the main issues across the whole trust. This insight can then make it easier to make connections between different parts of an organisation.

There are serious consequences to complaints not being dealt with adequately:

Reduction in public trust
Unwelcome media attention
Added burden, sapping time and resource from other pressing and important tasks
Escalation to financial claims
Compliance or enforcement action by the Care Quality Commission (CQC)
GMC referrals, litigation and damaged relationship with commissioning boards

We have extensive experience providing complaint management services to a range of private and public sector organisations. Working with us helps to reduce the risk of legal action and damage to brand reputation, improve customer satisfaction, and saves internal resources. We understand the nuances of how to investigate a complaint, and our objective and impartial perspective provides strategic oversight that not only resolves immediate issues but provides long-term solutions to prevent problems recurring.

Verita’s priority is to respond quickly to requests for support and so can be based at a trust in a short space of time. We manage our projects carefully to ensure that they meet the requirements of clients as to issues such as timeliness and budget.

How Verita can help

Verita has first-hand experience of working with NHS trusts to help them improve their complaints system and clear the backlogs of complaints. We are able to devise and implement tailored complaints systems to suit the ways of working in a trust.

The team consists of experienced healthcare staff who can independently manage individual complaints within national and local guidance.

We provide a flexible tailored approach to meet the specific needs of your service. This could include providing support to a trust complaints manager or a more comprehensive service such as a review of trust policy and procedure.

What Our Clients Say About Us

“Thank you for an excellent session yesterday. Informative and helpful, backed by a wealth of practical experience; just what we wanted and needed. Everyone came up to me afterwards to say how much they had enjoyed and appreciated it.”

“Ed and the team at Verita provided a thorough and objective assessment of some difficult cases for us, helping us identify areas for improvement, meet a commitment to openness and engage the families involved. It made a real difference in addressing some long standing difficult issues.”

Our healthcare complaints resolution process

Our clinical complaints resolution process has several clearly defined stages, tailored specifically for the complexities of the healthcare sector:

Critical Analysis and Clinical Assessment

Utilising diagnostic tools refined through decades of extensive work with NHS trusts and independent healthcare providers, we perform thorough evaluations aligned with national healthcare best practice benchmarks. We review and assess complex medical complaints to identify and highlight areas of poor clinical practice, potential clinical negligence, and legal or claims liabilities. Simultaneously, we review trust policies and procedures to introduce robust, compliant guidance.

Working Collaboratively and Supportively

We facilitate clear communication between patients, families, and healthcare providers to achieve resolutions that uphold natural justice and the statutory Duty of Candour. We conduct our clinical complaint investigations in an open, non-judgemental manner that fully supports both the complainants and the frontline healthcare staff involved.

Reporting Excellence & Systems Learning

We deliver clear, objective evaluative reports that highlight essential process improvements and root-cause system failures, ensuring transparency throughout every stage of the investigation.

Ombudsman & Regulatory Readiness

Our findings stand robust under Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) scrutiny, ensuring your clinical defenses and evidence trails are thoroughly prepared should further appeals arise.

Your Strategic Healthcare Partner

We work collaboratively with your clinical staff and integrate seamlessly with internal complaints teams to implement long-term quality improvements. By choosing Verita as your partner in strategic healthcare complaint resolution, you gain an objective partner committed to resolving immediate clinical backlogs while providing the long-term, systems-based solutions needed to prevent patient safety incidents from recurring.

Our previous healthcare complaints management work

As well as specialising in handling complex, escalated complaints where internal processes have been exhausted, we ensure that areas of improvement are identified to improve standards of service.

Examples of our previous work include:

We have extensive experience of complaint resolution within NHS trusts, with many hundreds of individual complaints across multiple organisations now cleared, many of which were extremely complex and dating back months or even years. We reviewed trust’s complaints systems and suggested new models of working to improve the efficiency and quality of their systems. We have done this with the use of Verita’s bespoke ‘Complaint Handling Diagnostic Tool’, which provides a robust, repeatable basis for ensuring consistency and completeness in our reviews and are able to support other organisations to remove complaints backlogs on an ad-hoc basis.

Carrying out annual reviews of complaints processes and proposing improvements for organisations such as the General Medical Council.

Providing training in complaints processes

PSIRF readiness & culture alignment

In UK healthcare, the transition to the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) changes how the NHS investigates incidents and handles the resulting complaints. It represents a significant shift towards a system-based approach to patient safety, driving qualitative learning.

Verita provides healthcare organisations with the tools to seamlessly align their complaints handling service with PSIRF principles, turning everyday patient feedback and complaints into powerful, systems-based insights that enable genuine organisational learning.

We combine our health checks and cultural diagnostics with data collection advice and bespoke training to equip leaders and managers with the robust early warning signs needed to catch quality and performance issues before they escalate.

Verita's areas of expertise

Verita’s extensive experience as healthcare consultants, working with both public and private organsiations, means we have expertise in the following areas:

We understand the complexities of the healthcare industry and have tailored our complaints resolution service to provide support to healthcare organisations when they need it. Our unique set of skills help us resolve complaints about patient care quickly and efficiently.

Key Team Members & Associates

Peter Killwick
Peter has 25 years of consulting experience covering a variety of strategic and operational issues in a wide range of sectors including healthcare, automotive, financial services, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications and government.

Peter has extensive complaints handling experience and was the designer of Verita’s Complaint Handling Diagnostic Tool. He is the primary contact for the British Council contract, and so plays a key role in developing their process improvement actions, screening referred complaints for suitability for independent review and then leading the work for those complaints that we investigate.

Kieren Seale
Prior to joining Verita he had a varied career including working in the planning department at London Transport, in local government and in the private sector. Kieran spent five years working in governance roles NHS commissioning in Primary Care Trusts and Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), which included management of complaints processes.

Legally qualified, he has wide experience of delivering solutions to governance issues in the NHS and outside. Kieran leads Verita’s complaints work with organisations including Sport England, Arts Council and Heritage Lottery Fund. He has been guest speaker at a number of complaints conference and has designed and delivered complaints management training for NHS bodies

Thea Walton

Thea Walton is a senior leader and consultant with over 25 years’ experience overseeing handling complaints, in some of the UK’s most complex public sector environments and private sector business.

Her career spans the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme in Parliament, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, and the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, where she has led national teams, overseen high-profile investigations, and delivered systemic improvements in complaints handling and professional standards and ethics. She has also led work overseeing handling of allegations of violence against women and girls, and improving the experience of those needing to use complaints and oversight systems in a trauma informed way.

Find out more

For information on our tailored healthcare complaints resoltion services, please contact Verita founder Ed Marsden via email at [email protected] or on 020 7494 5670

Healthcare Complaints Resolution Insights

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