Thank you for contacting the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s
(PHSO) Freedom of Information and Data Protection Team. This is to confirm
we have received your request. If you have made a request for information
under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 or Environment Information
Regulations 2004, we aim to respond to your request within 20 working days
in accordance with the statutory time frames set out in both Acts. If you
have made a request for personal information held by the PHSO, your
request will be processed as a Subject Access Request under the provisions
of the Data Protection Act 2018 and we aim to respond within one calendar
month in accordance with the statutory time frame set out in the Act. We
may contact you before this time if we require further clarification or if
we need to extend the time required to complete your request.

Please note that we are currently experiencing a high demand, and might
not be able to comply with the statutory deadline for your request. Any
late responses can be referred to the Information Commissioner’s Office:

https://ico.org.uk/

For Subject Access Requests, we will send any personal information via
secure email, unless you instruct us differently. To access the
information on the email we send, you will need to sign up to our secure
email service. Details can be found on our website using the link below:
https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/about-us/co...
If you require us to post your personal information to you instead you
will need to inform us of this and confirm your current address as soon as
possible. Angharad Jackson Data Protection Officer & Assistant Director
Information Assurance Office of the Parliamentary and Health Service
Ombudsman PHSO CityGate 47-51 Mosley Street Manchester M2 3HQ
[email address]

31/03/2022

Dear Dudley Jones,

PHSO Reference 00000209

Acknowledgement of your request for information

Thank you for your correspondence of 29 March 2022.

Your correspondence will be handled as a request under the Freedom of
Information Act 2000. We aim to issue a full response by 28 April 2022.

If we require further information or cannot meet this deadline, we will
let you know.

You may find the information you are looking for on our website as part of
our  [1]Publication Scheme or [2]Casework.

To find out more about how we handle your personal data and information
requests, please see our [3]Privacy Policy.

Yours sincerely

Freedom of Information/Data Protection Team

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

References

Visible links
1. https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/about-us/co...
2. https://decisions.ombudsman.org.uk/
3. https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/about-us/co...

Dear Dudley Jones

Thank you for your email of 29 March 2022 in which you requested
information from the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. Your
request has been handled in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act
2000.

Your request for information

“Please provide the number of complaints made to the PHSO about the
Maternity Unit at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust between July 2018
to February 2022.

Please state the number of complaints fully upheld, partly upheld, and not
upheld.”

Our response:

Unfortunately, our data sets do not differentiate between units and
hospitals within trusts we only collect the data for the trust as a whole.
The complaints are not recorded on our system as being about the maternity
unit, they are recorded as being about the trust.

We have however looked at all the individual case summaries to ascertain
how many related to the maternity unit. There are some cases where
insufficient data is recorded on the summary.

We can say that between July 2018 and February 2022 there were 4
complaints received about the maternity unit. None of these complaints
were accepted for investigation due to either not being made in writing or
not being ready for us.

In health cases it is a legal requirement that a complaint must be made in
writing, it is also a requirement for any local NHS complaints procedure
to have been finalised prior to the complaint being ready for the PHSO to
consider. All 4 of the complaints mentioned were rejected based on one of
these two criteria.

We hope that this information is useful.

If you believe we have made an error in the way we have processed your
information request, it is open to you to request an internal review. You
can do this by writing to us by post or by email to
[1][PHSO request email]. You will need to specify what the
nature of the issue is and we can consider the matter further. Beyond
that, it is open to you to complain to the Information Commissioner’s
Office ([2]www.ico.org.uk).

Yours sincerely

Angharad Jackson

Data Protection Officer

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

PHSO CityGate

47-51 Mosley Street

Manchester

M2 3HQ

E: [3][email address]

W: [4]www.ombudsman.org.uk

For information rights enquiries, please contact
[5][PHSO request email]

Want to know more about your information rights? Read our [6]privacy
notice

References

Visible links
1. mailto:[PHSO request email]
2. http://www.ico.org.uk/
3. mailto:[email address]
4. http://www.ombudsman.org.uk/
5. mailto:[PHSO request email]
6. https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/about-us/co...

Thank you for contacting the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s
(PHSO) Freedom of Information and Data Protection Team. This is to confirm
we have received your request. If you have made a request for information
under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 or Environment Information
Regulations 2004, we aim to respond to your request within 20 working days
in accordance with the statutory time frames set out in both Acts. If you
have made a request for personal information held by the PHSO, your
request will be processed as a Subject Access Request under the provisions
of the Data Protection Act 2018 and we aim to respond within one calendar
month in accordance with the statutory time frame set out in the Act. We
may contact you before this time if we require further clarification or if
we need to extend the time required to complete your request.

Please note that we are currently experiencing a high demand, and might
not be able to comply with the statutory deadline for your request. Any
late responses can be referred to the Information Commissioner’s Office:

https://ico.org.uk/

For Subject Access Requests, we will send any personal information via
secure email, unless you instruct us differently. To access the
information on the email we send, you will need to sign up to our secure
email service. Details can be found on our website using the link below:
https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/about-us/co...
If you require us to post your personal information to you instead you
will need to inform us of this and confirm your current address as soon as
possible. Angharad Jackson Data Protection Officer & Assistant Director
Information Assurance Office of the Parliamentary and Health Service
Ombudsman PHSO CityGate 47-51 Mosley Street Manchester M2 3HQ
[email address]

Dear Mr Jones

PHSO reference: 00000209

Internal review of your request for information

Thank you for your email of 7 April 2022. You requested an internal review
regarding our handling of your Freedom of Information (FOI) request made
on 29 March 2022.

Your original FOI request:

“Please provide the number of complaints made to the PHSO about the
Maternity Unit at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust between July 2018
to February 2022.

Please state the number of complaints fully upheld, partly upheld, and not
upheld.”

Response to your request:

“Unfortunately, our data sets do not differentiate between units and
hospitals within trusts we only collect the data for the trust as a whole.

The complaints are not recorded on our system as being about the maternity
unit, they are recorded as being about the trust.

We have however looked at all the individual case summaries to ascertain
how many related to the maternity unit. There are some cases where
insufficient data is recorded on the summary.

We can say that between July 2018 and February 2022 there were 4
complaints received about the maternity unit. None of these complaints
were accepted for investigation due to either not being made in writing or
not being ready for us.

In health cases it is a legal requirement that a complaint must be made in
writing, it is also a requirement for any local NHS complaints procedure
to have been finalised prior to the complaint being ready for the PHSO to
consider. All 4 of the complaints mentioned were rejected based on one of
these two criteria”

Time for response:

We received your original FOI request on 29 March 2022. In accordance with
the FOI Act we are legally obliged to provide a response within 20 working
days. We should have responded by 28 April 2022. We responded on 7 April
2022 and therefore complied with the Act.

Request for an internal review:

“Dear Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, Mr Wheatley made an
almost identical request on 7 September 2018 about an earlier period than
the one I specified…

[Quotes from FOI request made by Mr Wheatley]

…If you can provide an honest FOI Response to Mr Wheatley, can you now do
the same in responding to my request? Unless, of course, this is a
deliberate delaying tactic to force me into requesting an internal
review.”

Review of your request:

We note Mr Wheatley’s request was in two parts. The first was to request
the total number of complaints received about Shrewsbury and Telford NHS
Trust (the Trust) between 2000 and September 2018. The second part
specifically asked for number of complaints about the Trust’s maternity
unit within the same timeframe, as well as how many were upheld/not
upheld/partially upheld.

Your request, like the second part of Mr Wheatley’s request focussed on
the number of complaints about the Trust’s maternity unit within a more
recent but shorter timeframe (four years compared to eighteen years), as
well as how many were upheld/not upheld/partly upheld. As you did not
request the total number of complaints about the Trust, we will look at
how we responded to your request in comparison to the second part of Mr
Wheatley’s.

In Mr Wheatley’s request we note we explained that complaints were not
categorised by which specific unit/department but could identify five
complaints which had the keyword/complaint part ‘maternity/midwifery’. We
detailed that four of those complaints were investigated and gave the
outcomes of each.

In your request, as you only asked for the number of complaints
specifically about the Trust’s maternity unit, we did not give figures for
the overall number of complaints about the Trust as we did with Mr
Wheatley’s request. However, for your information 136 complaints (not
including any re-submitted complaints) were identified about the Trust
within the timeframe you asked for.

We manually inspected the case summaries of each of the 136 cases to
determine if any involved the Trust’s maternity unit, of which we
identified four complaints. We relayed the total of four complaints to you
in our response, which therefore satisfied the first part of your request
for ‘the number of complaints made to the PHSO about the Maternity Unit at
the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust between July 2018 to February 2022’.

We then went on to say that of those four complaints, ‘None of these
complaints were accepted for investigation due to either not being made in
writing or not being ready for us’. This satisfies the second part of your
request in which you wanted us to ‘state the number of complaints fully
upheld, partly upheld, and not upheld’. Given that none of the four
complaints identified progressed to investigation, none of them would have
closure decisions of fully upheld/partly upheld/not upheld.

We only use the decision categories of upheld/partly upheld/not upheld for
complaints which we conduct detailed investigations on. We do not
investigate every complaint we receive. For more details on our processes
for considering the complaints please see the following part of our
website:

[1]https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/making-comp...

None of the four complaints identified in your request progressed to Step
3 of the process outlined on our website.

Your email of 7 April 2022 suggests that our response to Mr Wheatley was
‘honest’ in comparison to the response to your request. However, we have
not seen that your request was dealt with inappropriately or had any
omissions to suggest our response was not an accurate or ‘honest’ one.
Whilst we hope the explanations above clarify matters, we do not uphold
your concerns about our handling of your FOI request and consider the
matter closed.

Should you remain dissatisfied with our handling of your FOI request it is
open for you to escalate the matter to the Information Commissioner’s
Office ([2]www.ico.org.uk).

Yours sincerely

Mike Avery

Senior Information Rights Officer

Information Rights Team

References

Visible links
1. https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/making-comp...
2. http://www.ico.org.uk/