General Practitioners: Complaints

(asked on 29th March 2023) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many patients used the complaints procedure of their local GP surgery in England in each of the last five years; and what was the average length of time GP surgeries in England to investigate patient complaints and to provide a response.


Answered by
Lord Markham Portrait
Lord Markham
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 6th April 2023

The following table shows the number of complaints received by general practitioners (GPs) in the past five years, and is derived from the document, ‘Data on Written Complaints in the NHS 2021-22’. A copy of this document is attached.

Year

Number of complaints

2021/22

99,459

2020/21

72,087

2019/20

Not available

2018/19

72,356

2017/18

75,782

The data collection for GP practices was suspended in 2019/20 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so data for that year is unavailable. Data on the length of time that it took GP surgeries to investigate and provide a response to complainants is not collected centrally.

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