RICS Ombudsmans Services. NHS Livewell Southwest Ltd. (559)

To the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Secretary:
For Clarity - Attempt 559.

559) Complaining is a Difficult Process.

Dear Mr Clark,

Naomi Creutzfeldt and Chris Gill produced a Policy Brief entitled - Understanding and Engaging Online Citizen Activists. Centre For Socio - Legal Studies, Oxford University. Consumer Insight Centre Queen Margaret University. December 2015.

On page 7 they highlight the difficult and stressful nature of complaining.

Complaining is indeed a difficult process. I can testify to that. People have become highly skilled at keeping you waiting and then not answering your questions.

That is incredibly stressful and incredibly wrong. It shouldn't be allowed to happen in this day and age but it does. That it persists so successfully points to a failure of successive politicians to empower the people who put them into office. It is corroding democracy.

I asked the CEO of Livewell Southwest Ltd (formerly Plymouth Community Healthcare):
Q. Why weren't the names of those responsible for this shameful decision included in your email to our late father's advocate? The shameful decision being the one that decided to, "award" our late father two weeks grace from having to pay the full cost of his care.
You say,
"It is not usual practice to name individuals who have been involved in the verification process."

A system in which the individual is subjected to a," verification process" (that in effect could take from them everything they've lived and worked for) and doesn't even permit them to know who is responsible for that decision and just exactly how it was arrived at, is tyrannical. It belongs in a bygone age.

The response I received states that the MDT assess the information which is passed to the CCG who assess the information and that the patient and his or her family are somehow expected to know who these people are and how they arrived at their fantastical decisions.

In short, we still do not know for the decision and we still do not know the medical evidence upon which it was based.

There is no transparency and no accountability in this branch of the NHS.

This is what I mean when I say that the, "verification process" is an extortion racket.

If the sick, the elderly and the dying (and their loved ones) are to be further subjected to the appalling National Framework for NHS Continuing Healthcare and NHS Funded Nursing Care, then at the very least patients should have the right to know who it is who are making such hugely important decisions and what evidence those decisions are being based upon.

Q. Mr Clark, Francis Muade said that transparency was to be at the very heart of government. Where is the transparency in these NHS decisions?

Yours sincerely,
Steve Gilbert.

The Ombudsmans61percent Campaign can be found at: www.blogger.com