NHS complaints managers face a clear conflict of interest, trying to balance their duty to their employer against their obligations to complainants.

That’s the conclusion of research into the tensions inherent in the complaints manager’s role, as featured in Health Care Risk Report (Sept).

Interviews were conducted with 30 complaints managers, five regional complaints heads and other complaints experts. Job descriptions and person specifications for post-holders were also analysed.

The findings suggest that complaints managers are often torn between loyalty to their organisation and their need to represent the person making the complaint. The result is friction and, quite often, flak from both sides. Some of those charged with handling complaints say that it is doubtful they get the truth when staff are approached for their version of events; others, says the researcher, side with staff.

Further conflict arises from organisations’ “basic failure” to learn from previous complaints. Although many of the job descriptions say that complaints managers should work to improve quality, in fact “considerable constraints” impede them from doing so.

Among those constraints are NHS bureaucracy, lack of resources, local policies and complaint managers’ lack of attachment to any particular directorate.

Troublemakers were identified on both sides of the patient-staff divide. Some respondents comment on the litigious nature of healthcare. “You get the people who are frankly out for the money,” one manager says. “And we get quite a lot of those actually, proportionately.”

Another had trouble with doctors: “How do you go to a 60-year-old consultant and say, ‘I think you ought to go on a customer-care course’?”

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