The Royal Free Hospital

• I AM writing to advise anyone whose GP has been told by the Royal Free Hospital that it has referred them for a procedure at another hospital to check whether the referral has really been made.

My GP was informed by the RFH in January that I had been referred. Nagging doubts due to my previous experiences of administrative failures at the RFH led me to check six months later with the hospital I had supposedly been referred to. They had no knowledge of me and had received no referral.

PALS, the patient advice and liaison service, tried three times on my behalf to alert the hospital to its error. All three approaches were ignored.

Alerted by me, the hospital I was meant to have been referred to left multiple messages with the department concerned, and was repeatedly ignored.

What to do?

I decided going through the hospital’s official complaints procedure was the only way to flag up to senior managers’ administrative failures impacting patient care.

Referrals are made digitally and the relevant IT systems administrator would presumably be able to see without much effort who did (not) do what and which other patients’ referrals might also need urgent checking.

My complaint was acknowledged at the beginning of July and the RFH initially gave itself a generous seven weeks to investigate and answer.

I waited patiently but the promised deadline expired without my hearing anything. I contacted the complaints department again; the mail was ignored.

A week later I mailed senior managers directly.

Within hours the complaints department wrote to give itself a further six-and-a-half weeks as it was “still waiting for information from some staff involved”.

How absurd! If there had been any proper concern about referrals ordered by consultants not actually being made the director of nursing should have got up from their desk and spoken directly to relevant staff when the complaint was first made.

What information do they expect staff to recall many months later?

And yes, you guessed it, the second deadline the RFH set itself has come and gone and I have received no answer or holding reply whatsoever.

The RFH trumpets its “world class care values” including “being actively respectful” and “communicating clearly”.

I have found its complaints process to be full of disrespect, short on communication, and seemingly designed to demoralise and reduce to silence.

NAME AND ADDRESS SUPPLIED, NW5