Spotlight reports

This report was published in 2017 and focuses on the impact of complaints on staff who have been complained about. Whilst organisations are increasingly more likely to describe themselves as 'learning organisations', research suggests that being subject to a complaint can have an adverse impact on the individual involved and can limit, rather than promote, learning. 

The overriding message that has emerged from this report is that organisations need to actively support their staff through complaints processes and engage staff in positive and purposeful activities to manage and learn from complaints. Getting this right will encourage staff, help drive improvement in services and promote learning.

Input and advice was provided to this report by the staff of the Equality and Human Rights Commission in Scotland, and by Dr Gordon Skilling, who is a specialist psychiatric adviser to SPSO. 

Download the Making Complaints Work For Everyone report (PDF, 945KB)

In March 2017, we published our first ever thematic report. It focuses on medical consent - a recurring theme in the complaints people bring us and a particularly topical subject in light of significant and ongoing changes in the law and policy underpinning consent. 

The report details the sometimes devastating impact for individual patients when consent is not properly obtained. The aim of the report, however, is not only to highlight the issues we see, but to explore the context and reasons for this, and to encourage others to use the learning from complaints to support improvements in services. The report sets out the common themes in our investigations in this area, with case studies to illustrate these.  It includes a practical tool (the consent checklist) for health organisations, scrutiny bodies and policy-makers to use in evaluating whether a consent process is robust enough to avoid the common failings we see

Download the Informed Consent report (PDF, 246KB)