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To Complain or Not To Complain?

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ferry23 Mon 27-Jul-26 19:14:06

Samsara1

I think Oreo is right. Your GP is responsible for the clinical staff and their standards of care and expertise. Is the wound clinic at the hospital or the surgery. I would ask if there is a specialist clinic you can attend. As a manager in the NHS I advised that the 'squeaky wheel gets the oil'. I also established a specialist Tissue Viability Team its might be worth doing a search for one. Not necessarily complain but explain how awful the whole experience has been for you. Good Luck and I hope you get some healing soon.

Thank you.

We don't have a Tissue Viability Team here unfortunately. I have been attending the Wound Clinic at the hospital since September of last year. It was a struggle to get there however, as my my GP surgery insisted they weren't able to refer either to the Wound Clinic or to the DN team as I was able to get a taxi into the surgery which means I wasn't "housebound". Even though at one point I had to go every day for two weeks which cost me over £200.

It was my own research and tenacity that got me referred to the Dustrict Nurses team and they referred me to the Wound Clinic.

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Samsara1 Mon 27-Jul-26 19:02:31

I think Oreo is right. Your GP is responsible for the clinical staff and their standards of care and expertise. Is the wound clinic at the hospital or the surgery. I would ask if there is a specialist clinic you can attend. As a manager in the NHS I advised that the 'squeaky wheel gets the oil'. I also established a specialist Tissue Viability Team its might be worth doing a search for one. Not necessarily complain but explain how awful the whole experience has been for you. Good Luck and I hope you get some healing soon.

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Oreo Mon 27-Jul-26 18:42:43

See my GP face to face and if possible show him/her the photos and say how miserable you have been and how very long this has been going on.
I wouldn’t put in an official complaint.

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ferry23 Mon 27-Jul-26 18:38:46

As some of you will know or remember, I've been battling with what was originally a cut to my leg, which then became infected, is now a venous ulcer and has also developed into lymphoedema for over 19 months now.

It has truly been a whole tale of woe from start to finish - except of course it isn't finished.

Today, I went through all the photos I have taken of my leg over the months. It's like a scene from a horror film. Infected dressings falling out of the bottom of bandages and resting on my foot. Bandages unravelling and trailing behind me. Foot swollen and turning blue when the bandaging was too tight. Skin bleeding in the crease of the front of my foot and the ankle due to compacted wadding rubbing into my ankle for a week. Huge red welts on my leg where a wrong size compression stocking dug into the top of my leg. And more.

I've also been prescribed 7 lots of antibiotics in 14 months.

(This is summarising)

I was going through the photos with my cousin this afternoon and she said I really should be putting in an official complaint.

That's what a lot of people have said, but yes, I can complain about some of the treatment from my surgery, and possibly some of the treatment at the Wound Clinic.

But I can't actually see what it is that I will achieve. They won't be paying me out massive amounts of money so I can cruise around the world first class. They will tell me they have noted my comments, spoken to the staff and "lessons have been learnt". And I will probably get a black mark at my surgery.

What would you do?

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