Hywel Dda University Health Board has been accused of an ‘appalling lack of respect’ by the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales after a mother was left waiting nearly two years for a complaint response over the NHS treatment of her son.

Despite agreeing to a series of Ombudsman recommendations earlier this year, the board failed to provide Ms A (anonymised) with a response regarding her son’s eye treatment.

Ms A originally complained to the Health Board in June 2014 and made a further complaint in January 2016 due to the lack of update on the original investigation. The Ombudsman found that the delay in dealing with Ms A’s complaint was excessive and the lack of updates amounted to maladministration.

The Health Board specifically agreed with the Ombudsman to respond to the issue as a formal settlement, but then failed to honour that agreement. It then gave Ms A a date by which it would respond to her and again didn’t meet that.

As a result, the Ombudsman has taken the exceptional step of issuing a special report - the first one of this nature ever issued against a Health Board.

The major recommendation of this report is that Hywel Dda’s chief executive should personally respond to the Ombudsman having undertaken a review of the resources available to the complaints and concerns team and its capacity to deal with complaints received in a timely way.

Nick Bennett, Public Services Ombudsman for Wales, said: “I’m disappointed the Health Board did not fulfil its promise to give a full response to Ms A’s concerns over the treatment of her son within a reasonable timeframe.

“To not resolve this after nearly two years shows an appalling lack of respect towards Ms A and her son, and has added unnecessary stress to Ms A’s family.

“Since publishing this special report, the Health Board has responded to me and agreed to implement my recommendations. However, I still have serious concerns about the Health Board’s management of its complaints handling function and its candour and governance, and will be monitoring it closely over the coming months.”

‘Indefensible’, says chief executive

A statement issued by the health board’s chief executive, Steve Moore, said:

“On behalf of the health board, I would like to apologise unreservedly for the way in which we handled a complaint about the care received by one of our patients, following a report by the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales.

“It is indefensible and should never have happened. I would like to confirm that all actions required by the Ombudsman have been undertaken, although I accept he did not receive my confirmation of this prior to writing his report, and for that I also apologise.

“We acknowledged last year that our ability to respond in a timely way to all concerns was not fit for purpose, as we had acquired a significant backlog. This is not an excuse, but an explanation of where we were. Since then, we have invested the time and money to address this and made significant improvements to our ability to manage concerns appropriately and in a timely way. We are also strengthening the integration of formal correspondence in the health board to prevent something like this from happening again. We want to ask our population to trust in us that we have made significant improvements and not to be discouraged from logging a concern as it is important to us to redress people who have not received the care they should expect and so we can learn and share valuable lessons to inform continual improvement to our services.”