Pharmacy Daily | Complaints are not national

AUSTRALIA’S health care system is suffering due to a lack of national data on health care complaints, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Sydney. “It is time to agree upon a national data set for complaints,” said Sydney Medical School's Professor Merrilyn Walton, lead author of the study. “All states and territories collect data on health complaints but there is no consistency about what is collected and how the terms are defined. “Any meaningful comparison and national analysis about health care complaints, a highly valuable source of information, is currently impossible. “This means that it is not possible to benchmark complaints, make definitive state-by-state comparisons or establish best practice in relation to time frames for assessment, conciliation or investigation,” she added. The study, published in The Australian Review of Public Affairs, looked at complaint statistics from the published annual reports for all state and territory health care complaint commissions over a five year period, and found that comparisons between commissions were possible only for the most basic data. In addition, researchers noted that shared data was reported by the commissions on only four out of an identified list of 18 items. “Categories for which there is no overall national total include the number of enquiries or complaints, because that data is not collected by all the commissions,” said Walton. “There is no national number for type of organisation complained about, for completed investigations or for outcomes of those investigations that are completed. “There is no national total for complaints referred to a registration board or for disciplinary action,” she added. According to the researchers, the reasons for a lack of national data include an inconsistency in the definition of terms including a lack of common understanding and use of the term complaint, as well as inconsistencies between commissions which include some using percentages whilst others use numbers. “Different statutory requirements for different commissions explains some of this but one would expect each jurisdiction to have similar accountability and transparency requirements in relation to public reporting,” Walton said. MEANWHILE, despite the issues with national data, researchers were able to identify several trends in complaint reporting, including the fact that treatment issues are uniformly the most common issue for all commissions (excepting WA). Interestingly, this finding is at odds with current health literature which names poor communication as a cause for complaints, with the findings showing that treatment consistently outranked communication across all HCCs and years. “Unsurprisingly, given they are the largest type of health service organisation, public hospitals were the most complained about group,” said Walton. Queensland received the highest percentage of complaints about public hospitals (59%) with the remainder of the health care complaint commissions receiving between 13% to 25% of hospital complaints.

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