Released 5 July 2024
Request:
Under the Freedom of Information Act, I would like to request the following information regarding complaints on maternity units within your trust from January 2022 to May 2024:
- Number of Complaints: The total number of complaints received.
- Nature of Complaints: Details of the nature of each complaint.
- Outcome: Information on the outcomes of these complaints, including any actions taken.
Information disclosed:
The Trust provides maternity services across four main hospital sites including a community midwifery service. Further information about the Trust’s maternity services can be found on our website.
During the period of your request there were 21,176 registrable births over 24 weeks in the maternity units within the Trust.
- A total of 188 maternity complaints/concerns were received by the Trust’s Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) between January 2022 and May 2024.
- Please see the table below for a breakdown of the topics related to the 188 complaints/concerns as coded on our Datix administration system.
* Please note that within the table where no individual value is provided, the data has been anonymised in line with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) Anonymisation: Managing Data Protection Risk Code of Practice as it relates to the disclosure of information relevant to a small number of living people.
We have therefore combined all complaint numbers that involved 5 or fewer patients and provided a total figure for this section of the table to ensure that our response to this part of your request was meaningful.
We consider the disclosure of more specific information to be exempt under section 40(2) [personal information] exemption.
3. We regret that we do not hold information about the outcomes of these complaints or actions taken over this period on our new Datix system. Any effort to compile this data would require the manual audit and review of all 188 complaint/concern records mentioned above. Following the review, data relevant to ‘outcomes’ and ‘action taken’ would then need to be categorised and presented in a similar way to the table provided for question 2 of your request (see above).
Such an endeavour would require considerable staff time which would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ as outlined in the Fees Regulations and section 12 provision [cost limit] of the FOIA would be applicable.
More importantly, the Trust would also be creating ‘new’ information it does not already hold, which goes beyond the simple manipulation of system data. It is important to note in these circumstances that the Trust is not required under the terms of the Act to create ‘new’ information for the purpose of answering a FOI request. According to guidance issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office, where the provision of information will require complex analysis and a high level of skill and judgement to produce, this would amount to creating information not already held.
An assessment of the work involved in providing the level of detail you are seeking concluded that it meets the criteria of information ‘not held’ under this guidance.
Attachment:
FOI240243 – Complaints – Maternity service January 2022 and May 2024 (81kB pdf)