I’ve been the lead doctor for complaints in my practice for more than 30 years and we used to get one formal complaint every two or three years. Unfortunately, because of the modern world of complaints culture we have seen a huge surge in complaints with as many as three complaints a day being emailed into the practice. This is affecting all GP practices throughout the UK and is using up a lot of GP and practice staff time trying to sort these out, time which isn’t then available for sick patients.

The situation is so bad that they held a major conference in England recently to look at the causes and try to find a solution so the GPs can get on with their work of looking after sick patients. Some practices are now closing half day a week just to deal with all this extra work that comes from complaints.

The GP conference found that most of the formal complaints submitted to practices were about “routine access issues“ and didn’t actually qualify as formal complaints. Many of the complaints were about hospital waiting lists for outpatients, surgery and investigations.

The majority of complaints were from young people age 20 to 40 years adopting an Amazon Prime attitude of “I want it now and I’m going to complain if I’m not happy“. Complaints from older patients were rare but were found to often be submitted by younger relatives where the patient themselves was reluctant to complain. Is this helpful or is this coercive control? Older patients understand that their natural ageing process should not be over medicalised as their lives then become a misery of hospital appointments. Inappropriate complaints will lead to doctors adopting an attitude of defensive medical practice where every ache or pain is investigated and referred. Too much medicine is bad for you!

Many complaints are now AI generated. You know that they’re AI because they’re 7 pages long, have perfect punctuation and grammar but don’t actually make any practical sense. Very time-consuming and really not what patients want their GPs to spend their time on. One GP received a 27 page letter full of legal threats which obviously means that the practice doesn’t need to deal with it as a complaint as a legal action is a separate process.

There’s also a group of patients who are abusing the complaints process to force their way to the front of the queue for care. Lodging complaints which are trivial and vexatious is stressful for staff as this is effectively bullying and harassment.

GPs will now have to challenge and sanction patients who abuse the complaints process and I would expect GP practices to introduce half day closing to cope with the situation.

One of the things that amazes me is the abuse some patients post on social media under their own names, abusing staff and disrespecting the service of their own GP practice and then walk into the practice the next day and ask for help! Would anyone try that on with a Derry hairdresser? Not a chance as they would be immediately barred- for life!

Public service in Northern Ireland is under funded, understaffed, overwhelmed and disrespected. People need to wise up before there’s no service left.