Recommendation 5

The Committee accepts that some mechanism for prioritising the number of health complaints is needed and notes that there is international precedent for doing so. Nevertheless, we remain concerned with the continued approach of not processing complaints at Levels 1 and 2 on the severity of injustice scale, and the lack of ambition to return to the previous patterns of complaint-handling. We note that in the past 18 months around 1,500 cases have not been taken forward as a result of this approach and that the PHSO has decided to continue with this prioritisation method until the end of the business year 2022–23