As a clinic, we strive to provide the best possible service for our patients. However, we recognise that sometimes you may feel that we have not met your needs.
A complaint is any communication involving goods or a service that requires an investigation and formal response. If you have any complaint or concern about the service you have received from the doctors or staff working at this centre, you are entitled to ask for an explanation.
We operate an in-house complaints procedure to deal with your complaint. This procedure does not deal with matters of legal liability or compensation.
We promise you we will:
1. How to make your complaint
We hope that we can resolve your problem easily and promptly and, where possible, at the time the problem arises and with the person concerned. If your problem cannot be sorted out in this way and you wish to make a complaint, we would request that you to do so as soon as possible, as this will enable us to establish what happened more easily. Please make your complaint in writing to The Lovely Clinic, 8 Beauchamp Place, London, SW3 1NQ or via email to [email protected]. If you would like assistance with making your complaint, a member of our team will be able to help you. Please be assured that any complaint you make, written or verbal, will be treated in the strictest confidence, and will have no effect whatsoever upon the level of treatment and care that you receive at our practice.
If you would prefer a family member, friend or advocate to make the complaint on your behalf, they may do so, and we will work with them and yourself to resolve the problem. However, whilst we can receive a complaint on your behalf, we cannot provide any medical information to a third party without your authority. To discuss or provide confidential information, we would require a note signed and dated by you. A member of our staff will be happy to assist you with this.
2. What happens next?
Your complaint will be acknowledged within three working days of receipt. This may well be a phone call from The Lovely Clinic to you (or your advocate) to make sure we fully understand your complaint. Our aim is to make a full response to you within the next 20 working days. During that time, the clinic will conduct an investigation to find out what has happened, and whether there is any action that can be taken to put things right. This will usually be undertaken by a senior member of staff not directly involved in your complaint where possible. If at the end of those 20 days we are still in the process of conducting our investigation, we will notify you of the situation, and keep you fully informed until our investigation has been concluded.
As a result of the practice investigation, we will:
If your complaint includes a member of staff signed up to the ISCAS Code via the Independent Doctors Federation, there is a three-stage procedure, where the complaint is initially raised directly with the clinic in stage one. In stage two, there is an internal review by someone not normally involved with stage one. If you are not satisfied by the outcome of both stage one and two, then an external review is carried out in stage three at an ISCAS independent adjudication.
A stage two complaint will be acknowledged within three working days of receipt, with a full response to the complaint being delivered within 20 working days, or an update on progress every 20 working days thereafter if additional time is required. The complaint should be concluded within three months unless there is a good reason to extend it to a longer timeframe. At stage three, ISCAS will send you a letter acknowledging the request for escalation within three working days of receiving the request and check with the subscriber that stages one and two have been completed within 10 working days. We will then provide complaint documentation within 15 working days of the request from ISCAS. ISCAS will appoint an Independent Adjudicator within five working days of receipt of the complaint file.
3. Getting further help with your complaint
We hope that we can resolve your problem through our practice complaints procedure, as that is its primary intention. We believe that this will give us the best chance to put the matter right with you, and the opportunity to improve what we do in relation to your complaint for the benefit of all our patients. If, however, we are unable to resolve your complaint we are members of the Independent Doctors Federation and will refer your complaint to the IDF for them to deal with further.
