Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman Avis 

I was sent to my local A&E by my GP with a numb foot, suspecting serious spinal nerve damage. Following MRI, damage was identified by duty doctor - a senior decision make over-ruled the duty doctor, declaring that nothing was wrong with my spine, sending me back home after 48 hours in A&E back into the care of my GP. Month later, with problems walking, went to another hospital, after initial problems, had nerve decompression surgery & am now, virtually housebound & disabled & possibly facing further surgery. Did the ombudsman rule in my favour ? - NO . In my firm opinion, this organisation should be scrapped & replaced by a new, fully independent ombudsman service, with accountability.
It is not fit for purpose.

Please DONT EXPECT ANYTHIG AT ALL FROM THIS SERVICE
As other people said , their service will try to find any exuses to reject your case...
Its big corruption within the NHS , one day everything would be revealed...
* 43 billions Pounds spent for an APP Test and trace
* 410 billions pounds spent during the corona mainly paid to family and freind companies
When It comes to compensate people for the negligence and the trauma they suffered withing the NHS, the Ombudsman then will try anything to not consider your case...Its corruption more than anything elese

Disgusting waste of tax payer money. Completely useless, rude, and pointless organisation that need closing down.
I submitted a complaint against a government department with clear evidence of wrong doing. The PHSO won’t investigate and have me two separate excuses, neither of which made sense or related to my complaint against the government department and a scheme they run. They rudely told me my MP contacting them wouldn’t matter because they don’t answer to MPs. The problem is they’re another useless tax payer funded organisation that answers to and is accountable to no one! So they do what the hell they want and treat ordinary decent members of the public that are looking for help with absolute contempt while covering up wrong doing.

No wonder there is a mental health crisis in this country and scandals like the post office, infected blood, grenfell etc all escalated out of control.

Unless you have money in this country you are nothing and there is no one to help.

The health ombudsman service is a whole waste of time if the government want to save money then this service should axed. So it seems the NHS can treat you like s**t and get away with it well I hope it happens their relatives and see if they find it acceptable then. If you wasn’t interested in my complaint then you should have said that from the beginning save me writing it. State of this country is a joke.

My Cambodian wife and I had a torrid time with the Home Office during and after Covid. Their main fault was not replying to us or to our MP. In order to get a reply we registered a formal complaint and eventually extracted a reply 10 months later that was not satisfactory. We referred the case to the Independent Examiner of Complaints who fully upheld our complaint. For all the aggravation and extra costs incurred because of the Home Office's failure to respond - worries by the way on top of everyone else's about Covid - we were offered £500 compensation. The Ombudsman endorses that. It accords with their Principles of Remedy and Guidance on Financial Remedy. Apparently for a saga that began in July 2020 they say our "distress, worry and annoyance" lasted only up to 6 months. In fact it began to"diminish" only after March 2023 and it will never go away entirely.

Update 6/11/2024 PHSO sent me a questionnaire for feedback. Easy to guess my responses but does replying do any good?

Update 13 March 2025. I keep getting survey requests "what do I think of PHSO"? Well considering despite our complaint being full upheld and [token] compensation awarded, still Home Office not only holds back on paying that, but also doesn't reply to questions about why the scheme is so meagre, and apparently our now 5 year bad experience was assessed to be "distress, worry or annoyance" of only up to 6 months. My reply to the survey-folks: "Waste of time... just not interested in how to improve services, and much less that government officials must actually heed criticisms."

Update 16 June - Home Office still not paying-up compensation awarded, let alone giving explanations about delays and the way it was calculated.

Do not trust the PHSO.
In my case, the caseworker deliberately misquoted my statements or took them out of context in order to give a negative response to my claim. This was a well rehearsed, biased and dishonest response to defend staff members of HMCTS.

Absoloutly uselles, done everything possible to swerve taking on my complaint, i had the referel and an organisation they deal with , still kept ignoring what i was saying and repeating himself, till i got the hump and put the phone down .no wonder every other review is 1 star..im sure like myself that would be no stars ....if it was an option

A total waste of time. It is no wonder why so many public services fail the people they are supposed to be taking care of. The PHSO seems to be only there to give the impression of some degree of accountability.
They are antiquated, inefficient and lazy.
There is no point in contacting them because they are only going to tell you they DON'T CARE.

I'm afraid that if you have a genuine concern about a public service, the PHSO is not going to help you.

In other words: don't bother.

Terrible organisation do not put your trust into these people to do the right thing they won’t they ignore evidence and contradict absolutely everything whilst messing you about for two years and giving you hope that they will help you. Disgusting place not fit for purpose

How is this corrupt service allowed to continue, they are far from impartial and they allow The NHS to act with impunity!!!!

I am shocked at how blatantly corrupt The PHSO is, they ignore all evidence and close cases. This organisation needs to be investigated and shut down it is not independent it’s sole purpose is to protect the NHS and all of its negligence.

Sickening organisation!!!!!

Another toothless organisation. No investigation. Response a load of claptrap. Brushed it under the carpet. Welcome to Batshit Bonkers Britain were the poor and disabled are left to suffer injustice and the rest abuse their positions without an eyelid batted. Utterly disgusting and disgraceful. Don’t bother wasting your time.

What a complete and utterly useless and incompetent set of people.

For more than a year, they have done absolutely nothing except waste everybody’s time and sit on all the evidence.

Not once have they actually investigated the corrupt GP.

A year if nothing and then they close my complaint after doing nothing.

Absolutely shambolic

Utterly useless. They block, barrier and don't enable any progress or change. Utterly disinterested in investigating - made me wait 6months for a reply from the GP (which addressed none of the issues) and said they were happy. Fails as a service and fails the vulnerable. What a waste of money.

Nothing more than time wasters had a claim with these cronies jow for two years and nothing has been done to my case they have blocked all emails and phone calls I had advocates involved and they stopped responding to the advocates I then got a new advocate now.and I have sent emails stating my new advocate is taking over and they have today said to my new advocate they haven't received my email to hand over the case and my advocate has seen the emails told them.he seen them now their asking for proof I am can't keep going on fighting a losing battle I have now had to shut down my case for.good and go to court about this as it's been over two years now.they are a lot of liers they promise U things and don't go on those promises and when.u ask for compensation they then ignore U then get nasty towards U

Absolutely pointless public service! Wasting of time and the caseworker not even tried to contact HMRC despite the all evidences I have provided accusing HMRC of wrongdoing! And even the Adjucators office confirmed that HMRC took wrong decision!

For the last route of escalation for mistreated vulnerable adults this is the absolute worst service imaginable.
I have raised 4 different complaints concerning 4 different care homes and they have always just closed the complaints down stating they have reached a satisfactory resolution!

This is factually incorrect so for my last complaint I am attempting to fight it and prove them wrong as the care home did not provide a reasonable response to my complaint.

In short as the highest point of escalation for representation in the uk they are absolutely useless and are just getting paid without properly providing the people with any form of justice!

Disgusting!

I put so much faith in the Parliamentary Health Service Ombudsman to look at the complaint I made about a hospital community worker ignoring the Mental Capacity Act, Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards and giving an elderly vulnerable patient with care and support needs a terminal cancer diagnosis with a poor prognosis in error. With the complaint I submitted a safeguarding investigation report acknowledging all the concerns I had raised. The Senior Case Worker dismissed the investigation report as evidence along with other evidence, he didn't understand the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, and claimed that it was acceptable for next of kin to give consent for care without lasting Power of Attorney. The Senior Case Worker in the preliminary report would say the records say ........ and when you query the accuracy it is an opinion or an assumption.

The PHSO claim their values are: Independence, Fairness, Excellence and Transparency.

I received a poor service from the time I met the Senior Case Worker and as my evidence was excluded how can they possibly make an impartial or fair decision.

The Government should look at how they operate from the Ombudsman down.

Shocking experience using PHSO services.

PHSO needs to be shut down and replaced with an organisation that will safe guard people's lives.

My sister has suffered severe mental health issues which ended up with two suicide attempts although she was supposed to safeguarded.She is now so ill that she will now have to spend her life in supported living due to the lack of support from the mental health team.I complained to the phso only to get a professional narcissist twisting everything I said to make the complaint about me.I feel absolutely let down by their abrupt response,they are definitely out to shift the blame

The whole organisation needs reforming from top to bottom as they are currently a waste of taxpayers money. (Maybe this is something Rachel Reeves should look at if she wants to save money) The way they deal with complaints is not satisfactory, they ignore evidence, do not seem to look at the whole complaint raised and seem to flip flop with their decisions. In my case they found the hospital trust had done things wrong confirmed by their own nursing clinician, but upon receiving the decision letter, they were not going to do anything about it unless it happened again so more or less saying that they want someone else to die before they recommend changes. This is another problem with the PHSO they have no powers to force a hospital trust to implement any recommendations. They did review my complaint again done by the PHSO assurance team, only after intervention by my MP, however this took another year and again they said one thing that they were going to find the hospital trust did not carry out a review they said they were going to do, but after this senior caseworker SH had a meeting with the CEO of the trust ( a meeting we were not allowed to attend)he changed his mind without giving a full explanation or providing any evidence to backup this change. This organisation is just another arm of the NHS as they take everything told to them by the hospital trusts at face value without fact checking to see if it is true, they do not ask enough searching questions when supposedly investigating claims. In my case I provided more documentation to the PHSO than the hospital trust did. This organisation should be ashamed of the way it treats complainants as from experience it is definitely not as independent as it claims to be as proved by the low ratings that it gets on trustpilot and by the low number of cases it upholds which has dropped considerably over the past few years. They would say that people who give bad reviews on trustpilot only do so because their cases were not upheld, but based on the balance of probabilities surely then if they were doing a good job you would see an average of good reviews also and that is something you would be hard pushed to find about the PHSO. I intend to keep pushing my MP to enforce a review and a radical change in the way the PHSO is run because as it currently stands it does not inspire confidence in representing the general public as it should.