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PETER TYNDALL (Ombudsman of Ireland)
Thank you, the reporting question was called, Learning to Get Better,
it is available on the website, @ombudsman.ioi. We looked at because
I’ve been ombudsman previously in Wales. It seems to me that the
number of complaints that I was getting about the public health
service in Ireland were much lower than they should have been
compared to other ombudsman who had health in their jurisdiction.
And it is very difficult by looking at comparatively but why people had
not complaint was the issue where people not being signed posted to
my office when they complained to the local hospital or a doctor and
was it because that they were too exhausted by the process. And we
needed to use different techniques to what we normally used in an
ombudsman investigation. So, we placed adds in the newspaper and I
gave interviews on TV and radio inviting people to talk to us about their
experiences of complaining to the health service. And we also asked
people who happened to complained to tell us why they had not.

When we got information from members of the public we formed some
focus groups to talk with them to explore issues in more detail. We
also looked at the complaints we had received to see if there are any
features about the compliant handling by the health service that might
be causing difficulty and then we sent a survey to each public hospital
in Ireland asking them to tell us how they managed complaints. And we 3 rd INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON OMBUDSMAN INSTITUTIONS
also went and visited seven hospitals around Ireland, different kinds of
hospitals, where we inspected the complaint files, interviewed people
managing complaints and we also looked and found for instance
whether there were leaflets or posters telling people how to complain,
we did an audit of websites to see if it was obvious on the website how
you could complain about health service and we came up with some
results, conclusions and recommendations designed to bring about
change. One of the other things we did was we invited the head of the
health service to speak of the launch of the report and to commit his
organization to delivering on the recommendations.

The thing we found most of all was that people were afraid to complain
because they thought that if they complained the service they receive
would suffer so that they would be punished for complaining and we
found some evidence where in fact that was the case where people
had been criticized by staff from making complaints. So, we got strong

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