Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many and what proportion of complaints received by NHS England in each reporting year since 2017 have been related to racism.

We are informed by NHS England (NHSE) that data relating to complaints about racism is not collected centrally by the organisation. NHSE receives complaints made by, or on behalf of, patients only in relation to the services it commissions however this represents a very small proportion of the overall complaints received by the National Health Service (NHS).

Data on complaints made by, or on behalf of, patients about NHS services provided by NHS Trusts and General Practices and Dental practices is collected and published by NHS Digital on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care and can be found at the following link:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/data-on-written-complaints-in-the-nhs

Neither of these collections include a classification that would allow NHS Digital to identify numbers of complaints relating to racism.

It is possible that such information is collected by NHS organisations who directly manage their complaints locally.