We aim to close 95% of our cases within 12 months of receiving the complaint, although many are completed in less time. 

It is difficult to predict how long an individual investigation will take, as each case is different.  Generally, they take longer where they are complex, involve a lot of written material, where we need to make detailed enquiries, or if we need to get professional advice.  We will contact you and the organisation regularly, to update you on progress.

Yes, the person who made the complaint and the organisation involved can ask us to review the decision.  However, the grounds on which you can ask for this are limited. We will not accept a request for review on the basis that someone simply disagrees with the outcome of  their complaint.

We use independent professional advisers when looking at some of our complaints. 

Our professional advisers provide us with independent advice on health matters, including specialist advisers in: medicine, midwifery, mental health, obstetrics and gynaecology, dentistry, nursing, psychiatry and GP services. There are also advisers who specialise in social work, planning, equalities, environmental health and water services.

We will look at your complaint to see whether it can and should be investigated. See 'How we handle complaints' for more detailed information.  We may contact you for more information, or call you to discuss the complaint.

We sometimes receive multiple complaints about a council's decision to close a school or public facilities, or where members of a local community strongly oppose a planning application.  If we decide to investigate how such a decision was made, we're very likely to take one generally representative complaint, investigate that and let the other complainants know the outcome. This is what we did with a complaint on which we reported in May 2010.

No - we treat each complaint on its own merits. And our Act does not allow us to accept petitions or other broad based community representations.

We take the view that a single complaint made by an individual carries just as much weight as a group of people making a complaint. So when we get a large number of complaints about a particular issue, such as building a school or the closure of public facilities, we don’t treat the subject matter any differently from when someone brings us a complaint that only affects them.