Listening, Learning, Leading

How we work

Patient Ombudsman is a young organization, and we often hear that people are not aware of the help we can offer when they have problems with their healthcare.

As we look forward to the appointment of a new Patient Ombudsman in 2020, we continue to reach out to patient and caregiver groups and health providers to raise awareness of our services.

In our third year Patient Ombudsman staff visited 7 communities across the province and met with 26 stakeholder groups. We are also committed to ongoing learning and skills development. We welcomed subject matter experts to enhance our internal expertise on just some of the following:

• Supporting Indigenous identified complainants as they navigate our complaints resolution service in a culturally competent manner
• Supporting our own staff to build their internal resilience as they work with complainants in distress and living with a mental illness
• Palliative care and advanced care planning initiatives in hospitals
• The structure of pain specialist clinics and referral processes coordinated by public hospitals, and
• Gleaning insight into the work and unique processes of other ombuds offices, regulatory colleges and oversight agencies.

As we work with patients, caregivers and health sector organizations to resolve their concerns and improve healthcare, we are also focused on improving the services we offer and are listening to the feedback we receive. In our first two years, we heard from some that our resolution process took too long.

This year, we undertook a comprehensive review of our internal processes to respond to what we heard and learned from the experience of our front-line team. We reviewed how complaints are received and managed by our office with a view to increasing efficiency and eliminating unnecessary steps. Based on what we learned, we completed a re-design of our complaint management information system and introduced the changes in June 2019. To ensure that we can continue to produce high quality data, we developed a data dictionary, introduced data quality audits and provided training for the Patient Ombudsman team.

Service Charter

We also heard that patients, caregivers and health sector organizations wanted to better understand how we work.

They wanted to know what they can expect from us, what we expect from them and how they can most effectively engage with us. We consulted with patient and caregiver advisory groups and patient relations representatives of health sector organizations to develop and implement a service charter that describes how we work with patients, caregivers and health sector organizations to find fair resolutions to complaints. The Patient Ombudsman Service Charter was introduced in the winter of 2019 and we have shared it widely with patients, caregivers and health providers.

Results in our third year

Patient Ombudsman received a total of 2,419 complaints in our third year, a 5% increase over the previous year. This includes 1,766 complaint enquiries received by phone or in-person and 653 formal written complaints.

As in our first two years, the majority (62%) of complaints about health sector organizations within Patient Ombudsman’s mandate were about public hospitals. This was followed by home and community care coordinated by Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) (9%) and long-term care homes (8%).

18% of complaints were about health care services and providers that are outside of Patient Ombudsman’s jurisdiction. Complaints are often complex and involve many issues, some of which are within the Patient Ombudsman mandate and others that fall under the mandate of other oversight bodies, such as health professional regulatory colleges, the Information and Privacy Commissioner or the Ontario Ombudsman. Patient Ombudsman carefully analyzes each complaint to ensure a comprehensive response. When appropriate, Patient Ombudsman helps patients and families to navigate to a body or organization that can address their concern or parts of it. Our advice is, if you’re not sure, call us. If we can’t help, we’ll try to find someone who can. In all, Patient Ombudsman made over 2,000 referrals to other organizations, professional colleges and other resources to help patients and caregivers fully resolve their complaints. However, for some complainants, there is no one that provides independent oversight over their concerns—a consideration for future planning.

In our third year, a significant proportion, 267 (11%) of complaints were from patients and caregivers who raised concerns about access to or experiences with mental health and addictions services. Many of these complaints were from patients and caregivers who experienced delays or a lack of specialized services in their communities. We also heard from people who had difficulty accessing other health services, such as primary care, as a result of their mental health conditions.

Patient Ombudsman will continue to monitor and report on our mental health and addictions related complaints.

Monitoring complaint trends and clusters

By monitoring and shining a light on trends and consistent clusters of complaints, Patient Ombudsman hopes to encourage health sector organizations to review their policies and practices and seek opportunities to improve the care experiences of patients and caregivers. This year Patient Ombudsman is highlighting four spotlight issues.

Spotlight issues: