Complaints about the Healthcare Commission

Find out how to make a complaint about the Healthcare Commission or about people acting on our behalf.

You can also find out about the types of complaints that we can and cannot investigate.

What we can help with

We can help if you wish to complain because you think that we have not carried out our work properly or you are unhappy about how we handled your personal information or a written request from you for information.

Complaints that we cannot deal with

We cannot help with:

  • Requests by NHS trusts for a review of their annual performance rating, outside the official period for such requests that follows our publication of the ratings in October.
  • Appeals against our decisions about whether or not to register a provider of independent healthcare.
  • Complaints about how we have handled an independent review of an unresolved complaint about an NHS trust, if your complaint is that you do not agree with our final decision.

Complaints about healthcare services

If you have a complaint about an NHS trust or an independent healthcare service, you should make your complaint direct to the organisation involved. If you have already done so and are unhappy with their response, we may be able to help. Find out more in Concerns about healthcare.

How to make a complaint about the Healthcare Commission

You can make your complaint by letter, email, or fax. If you are unable to make your complaint in writing, we will take your complaint by telephone.

If you know the department that is relevant to your complaint, or the right member of staff, you can make your complaint to them. If you don't know who to speak to, then contact our helpline: find out how in Contact us.

In your letter you need to tell us exactly what you are complaining about and what you hope will be done about it. If you have any evidence in the form of papers or documents you should include those too.

What happens next

Within five working days of receiving your complaint we will write to you to let you know who is handling the complaint and what we intend to do about it. We may also ask you for more information. 

We will then conduct an investigation, which may involve producing a report, interviewing staff or looking at relevant documents. We try to resolve complaints within 20 working days of hearing from you. If we are unable to do this we will let you know.

Once we have completed our investigation, we will contact you to let you know the outcome. This might be to:

  • Offer an apology
  • Provide an explanation of what happened and why
  • Make amends
  • Reject your complaint if we feel it is not justified

A two-stage process

If you are unhappy with the outcome of our investigation, you can ask for your complaint to be reviewed by a more senior member of staff.

Following this second-stage review, our response may be that:

  • Our original investigation was not thorough enough and we need to carry out a second investigation of your complaint.
  • The outcome of our original investigation was correct.

If we decide that we need to carry out another investigation, we will write to you to let you know who will be doing it. We aim to complete the second investigation within 30 days, but if we can't we will write to you every 20 days to let you know what is happening.

What to do if you are still not happy

If you are unhappy after we have told you the results of our second investigation, you can contact the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman at:

See also

Useful sites