Withering the Citizen, Managing the Consumer: Complaints in Healthcare Settings

Allsop, Judith; Jones, Kathryn L.

doi:10.1017/s1474746407004186

Cited by 25 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…humaneness, sensitivity, empathy, caring nature, respect and dignified interaction, amongst various cadres) [3,98,108,109]. This is consistent with sociological literature [4,110,111] which points to the centrality of learning from patient complaints, and to challenges involved in balancing systemic and management aspects and staff–patient relationships. Critically examining and then addressing the tensions between ‘relationships’ and ‘system’ issues within healthcare organisations can also be a useful approach for understanding and learning from complaints [112].…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 80%

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Key strategies to improve systems for managing patient complaints within health facilities – what can we learn from the existing literature?

Mirzoev

Kane

2018

Global Health Action

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Background: Information from patient complaints – a widely accepted measure of patient satisfaction with services – can inform improvements in service quality, and contribute towards overall health systems performance. While analyses of data from patient complaints received much emphasis, there is limited published literature on key interventions to improve complaint management systems. Objectives: The objectives are two-fold: first, to synthesise existing evidence and provide practical options to inform future policy and practice and, second, to identify key outstanding gaps in the existing literature to inform agenda for future research. Methods: We report results of review of the existing literature. Peer-reviewed published literature was searched in OVID Medline, OVID Global Health and PubMed. In addition, relevant citations from the reviewed articles were followed up, and we also report grey literature from the UK and the Netherlands. Results: Effective interventions can improve collection of complaints (e.g. establishing easy-to-use channels and raising patients’ awareness of these), analysis of complaint data (e.g. creating structures and spaces for analysis and learning from complaints data), and subsequent action (e.g. timely feedback to complainants and integrating learning from complaints into service quality improvement). No one single measure can be sufficient, and any intervention to improve patient complaint management system must include different components, which need to be feasible, effective, scalable, and sustainable within local context. Conclusions: Effective interventions to strengthen patient complaints systems need to be: comprehensive, integrated within existing systems, context-specific and cognizant of the information asymmetry and the unequal power relations between the key actors. Four gaps in the published literature represent an agenda for future research: limited understanding of contexts of effective interventions, absence of system-wide approaches, lack of evidence from low- and middle-income countries and absence of focused empirical assessments of behaviour of staff who manage patient complaints.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 80%

“…Ensure effective communication through training, reflection, mentoring and coaching [3,4,79,110,111]…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Key strategies to improve systems for managing patient complaints within health facilities – what can we learn from the existing literature?

Mirzoev

Kane

2018

Global Health Action

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“…Recent years have seen the spread of an American-style litigation culture in the UK, with members of the public increasingly seeking recourse to the law to achieve compensation, appeal or complain (Allsop and Jones, 2008).…”

Section: P a G Ementioning

confidence: 99%

Exposure to the Law: Accountability and Its Impact on Street-level Bureaucracy

Murphy¹,

Skillen²

2016

Social Policy & Society

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Little research has been conducted exploring the relationship between public sector accountability and the law. This is a significant oversight given the potential for this relationship to cause unintended consequences around issues of liability, especially in the context of a growing litigation culture. The purpose of the current research is to explore this relationship, using qualitative studies of public sector professionals in England. The findings of the study suggest that increasing emphasis on accountability has led to a growing magnification of legal risk in the public sector, with consequences for the ways in public sector professionals perceive their relations with the public.

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“…By the middle of the 1990s, it appeared that health policy had undergone something of a ‘becalming’ (Wainwright 1998) with the furore that greeted the introduction of the internal market leading to far less radical reform than had originally appeared to be the case. The Patient's Charter was published in 1991 (Department of Health 1991), but gave patients no enforceable rights in relation to their care, and awareness of the standards listed in the Charter remained low (from both staff and patients) with patient complaints still poorly dealt with (Allsop and Jones 2008). The Patient's Charter was important for signalling that a greater customer‐focus would be required of health services in the future, but seemed to make little difference at the time of publication.…”

Section: Extending Choice – Choice and Responsiveness In 1989 And 1996mentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a history of choice in UK health policy

Greener

2009

Sociology Health & Illness

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This paper examines health policy documents from the period in which the NHS was planned through to New Labour's reforms, to examine how the terms 'choice' and 'responsiveness' are used to position both users and the public in particular roles. It suggests that health consumerism is a process that has gradually appeared in the NHS through an extension of the choices offered to patients and the terms on which they were offered. Utilising Hirschman's classic framework of exit, voice and loyalty, we suggest that although there appears to be a strong relationship between the introduction of choice with the aim of securing greater responsiveness, that does not necessarily work in the opposite direction because the analysis of responsiveness suggests that there are other means of achieving this goal other than increasing choice through consumerist approaches to organisation. The implications of this analysis are explored for contemporary health service reform.

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Withering the Citizen, Managing the Consumer: Complaints in Healthcare Settings

Abstract: This paper considers concepts of citizenship and consumerism in light of

Cited by 25 publications

References 15 publications

Key strategies to improve systems for managing patient complaints within health facilities – what can we learn from the existing literature?

Key strategies to improve systems for managing patient complaints within health facilities – what can we learn from the existing literature?

Exposure to the Law: Accountability and Its Impact on Street-level Bureaucracy

Towards a history of choice in UK health policy

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