Session 2: How do people experience the process of raising a concern?

Introduction

Regulators emphasise the importance of people receiving services to be able to raise concerns about a professional’s practise. This is to ensure the quality and safety of care (General Medical Council, 2014, 2019; General Dental Council, 2015). It is generally agreed that complaints and concerns are important for identifying flaws and allowing lessons to be learned. 

Research before ours about raising a concern to a regulator focuses primarily on registrants’ legal and ethical duty to report colleagues. This can be through whistleblowing (to ensure the quality and safety of care) (General Dental Council, 2015; Biggar et al., 2020). Whistleblowing is in the public interest because it legally protects people to raise concerns that affect the public or workers in an organisation. Raising concerns through appropriate routes is seen as important in protecting the public and people working in health and social care to ensure the quality and safety of care (General Medical Council, 2014; General Dental Council, 2015). Our research looked at how and why the public raise concerns and their experiences of the process.

It is important that people who want to raise a concern have access to information and can do this easily (General Medical Council, 2019). This session will talk about our research in the content of public-facing websites and documents of UK regulators. There is an assessment of how easy it is to raise a concern using regulator websites. It also includes what information was available when a person wishes to raise a concern with a regulator.