Independent proprietor Sid Dajani explains how complaining can be constructive and wishes he could do more of it

I thought the embarrassing actions of people in jobs they know so little about and who know even less about the market in which they serve were done and finished. I’m still sore about the publicity and the waste of money on materials sent out to flu-vaccinating pharmacies by Abbott and Sanofi which actually not only publicised nurses and GPs offering the service but actually referred our patients to them. I thought the discovery of flu-ignorance was over for this year until I received an email from the Flu Fighters at NHS Employers. They said: “Currently, NHS Employers Flu Fighter is only funded to provide materials to NHS organisations, rather than private businesses providing NHS care”. They went on to say they would now make publicity materials available to pharmacies and we would be charged for them.

I wrote to them and said I appreciated and understood the constraints of budgets and delivery but hoped they could appreciate GPs were also sub-contracted to the NHS, that we were equally providing NHS care and we should all get treated as NHS providers. They replied that they had lots of requests from non-NHS organisations and they had been looking at how they could support colleagues from outside the NHS without incurring large amounts of costs for themselves. What got my heckles up was when they said: “As I am sure you will appreciate, our expenditure must be devoted to supporting our primary NHS audience.”

Whose patients?

Wow! I then replied that we saw far more patients than GPs, we were nearly wholly contracted to the NHS which meant their patients were ours, that we were vaccinating many NHS patients who would otherwise not be, and that their discrimination flew in the face of the NHS mantra of patient choice and access. I ended by saying if they didn't support us then they were ignoring their primary care audience and patients.

Getting complaints is no great sin – the sin is in not listening, acting, fixing and learning

To placate me, the reply came back as: “We are keen to learn more about the process in primary care for vaccinating healthcare workers, as we have the opportunity to pass on your experiences and challenges to our commissioners in Public Health England.” Clearly, my point had been missed – who mentioned vaccinating healthcare workers? My point was, why did we have to pay for NHS materials that were promoting flu vaccination that were freely available to others? I decided not to ask who made the poor decision and why someone was getting paid to do a bad job.

One foot in the business

I complained not because I have all the time in the world or because I’m being Victor Meldrew-esque, but because complaints are no bad thing. They are never good but they are not necessarily bad. Listening, learning and fixing are the foundations on which to build a good responsive business. I’m hoping NHS Employers will act like we would if we received a complaint and that they learn from it. Like us, would they ask themselves what they are learning from this complaint? Are they looking for trends, repeats and what they would do differently next time?

From my experience, sometimes your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning, so let’s see what NHS Employers/NHS Flu Fighters does next year because if needs be my complaint could be more public and on social media. For now, getting complaints is no great sin – the sin is in not listening, acting, fixing and learning. This time next year I'll be checking to see if this is the organisation with a memory that it espouses to be.

I had another trying moment when a gentleman unknown to me came in to collect a prescription for his daughter. After a quick and fruitless search, I double-checked her surname, first name and address. He confirmed them as accurate before I looked at the computer and saw we hadn’t dispensed any of her prescriptions since 2008. He became angry, animated and irate when I asked him if he was sure that he brought the scripts to us.

In front of several patients, he said he had brought in her two prescriptions himself and left them here so he could do some shopping. I was embarrassed. I apologised profusely to the patient and vowed to find them and offer an explanation. We searched high and low for those prescriptions in the hundreds of those already dispensed and did a search on what she had in 2008 as he couldn’t remember what the items were.

The search continues

I questioned the member of staff who took the prescription but she swore she had not moved away from the SOP; none of us saw the scripts and I didn't recall checking them. I then thought maybe it had been dispensed to the wrong patient, which would explain the absence of an entry on her PMR. We spent three hours frantically searching with worry – what had gone wrong and why? In the end I called the surgery to apologise, to request a new prescription, which we would shred when the other was found, and humbly requested what the items had been so I could issue an emergency supply.

The receptionist kindly agreed and so I gave her the name the gentleman had given us. She looked at her system and said: “Oh! It turned out the lady had married six years ago and the gentleman had used his daughter’s maiden name.

I called him back and told him the medicines were ready; they had been here the whole time and had been dispensed in her married name. He came over to collect them and I asked him politely why he had wasted our time and caused great embarrassment by not volunteering her married name when her maiden name was unrecognised. He said she had left her husband the previous month. I smiled politely, but in my head I killed him several times. Sometimes I wish we could complain about patients!