About this handbook

This handbook provides instructions on how to compile a sample of complainants to include in the survey. This handbook is aimed at those carrying out the sampling for, but not directly coordinating or managing, the complaints survey.

The survey is intended to be implemented as a rolling survey with a new sample of complainants being drawn once every two weeks. The complainants included in the sample should be those complainants who have received their outcome 4-5 weeks prior to sampling.

All complainants in your sample will be contacted by post or email. There will be 2 mailings – an initial mailing followed by one reminder to non-responders (with a gap of 2 weeks between the mailings). See the implementation guide for more information.

Compiling a list of complainants

Overview

This section explains how to draw your sample of complainants. Before mailing out the questionnaire, the organisation must do a check to ensure that no deceased complainants are included in the sample. This can be done through checking your own records. It is essential that you check that your organisation has no record of a complainant, selected for the survey, having died.

You can also use the Demographics Batch Service (DBS). The DBS enables users to submit and receive a file containing relevant complainant records electronically using dedicated client software. The complainant’s records in the file are matched against the NHS Spine Personal Demographics Service (PDS).

Please follow the instructions below carefully. We strongly advise that you read all of this section before you start to compile your complainants list. After compiling the sample, another person involved in this survey should check the file for errors.

Selecting your sample

This section describes how to create a sample. Please use the Excel ‘Sample compilation template’ provided in this Toolkit to compile your sample, where each row will represent one record.

Check your list for the following exclusions

The list should exclude:

• deceased complainants
• unreasonably persistent complainants. These are those complainants who, because of the nature or frequency of their contacts with an organisation, hinder the organisation’s consideration of their, or other people’s, complaints
• complex cases where organisations have been asked not to follow up complainants for clinical reasons
• opt-outs. If a complainant has indicated that they do not want their records used for secondary purposes (e.g. they have asked to be excluded from all surveys or they do not want their address details being used for any reason other than responding to their complaint.
• those individuals where being sent a questionnaire will cause undue distress. This is based on the judgement of the staff involved in managing the complaint. Where possible these judgements should be made jointly by more than one person in a complaints team
• complainants without a UK postal or email address (but do not exclude if addresses are incomplete but useable, e.g. no postcode – you can look the missing details up e.g. on Royal Mail Postcode Finder).
• Incomplete information. Check for any records with incomplete information on key fields (such as surname and address) and remove those complainants. However, do not exclude anyone simply because you do not have a postcode for them. Only remove a complainant if there is insufficient name or address information for the questionnaire to have a reasonable chance of being delivered. The more cases that are removed at this stage, the poorer the sample coverage and the greater the danger of bias.

Please therefore delete any records that fall into the above categories.

Please keep a log of all complainants that opt out or are excluded. This can be done in the data entry spreadsheet included in the toolkit.

Create the sample file ready for checking

The toolkit includes a spreadsheet template for you to compile your sample in (file name: Sample-Compilation-Template.xls). Please put your list of complainants into this spreadsheet.

NB: not all organisations will have a ICB code. If this is the case, please leave this column blank.

Blue headings are optional. But please include anything here that you might want to break your survey results down by – for example whether a complaint has been upheld, site or information.

Table 1 – Sample Excel file of complainants’ details

The following information is compiled using provider site records:

• complainant’s first name (or initial)
• complainant’s surname
• complainant’s address*
• complainant’s postcode
• complainant’s email address (for those receiving an online survey)
• paper or online survey should be ‘P’ if the complainant was contact via paper and ‘O’ if they received the survey online.
• date complaint made should be included in the form of dd/mm/yyyy
• date of outcome should be included in the form of dd/mm/yyyy

*The address should be held as separate fields (e.g. street, area, town, county and postcode).

The following additional information should also be entered on this spreadsheet:

• ICB Code – please provide the 3 character ICB code. This should be the ICB which will be billed for the care of the patient. Please see: Upcoming code changes – NHS England Digital
• Organisation name – full name of your organisation
• URN – e.g. COM-1001. This field should contain a 7-character code that is unique to each record, and will be a combination of
  • a 3-character code that is identical for every record (you can use a survey code such as ‘COM’ or if you are an NHS Trust you can use your three- character Department of Health code)
  • followed by a series of 4-digit numbers ascending from 1001 assigned by you. These final 4-characters should be unique for each record in the file. If you would like to keep your own provider site record numbers on the file, please use one of the ‘extra’ columns.
• Extra 1, 2, 3, 4 – please use these columns for any additional information such locality OR site information.
  • Extra 4: this field asks for the content of the complaint, as per the categories used in the KO41 return for your service outlined at KO41a Hospital and Community Health Services Complaints collection – NHS England Digital or KO41b Primary Care (GP and Dental) Complaints Collection – NHS England Digital.

Final sampling inspection

The sample data should be checked for errors by following the quality control checklist (see Table 2 below).

Table 2: Sampling quality control checklist

Keeping complainants’ mailing data and sample data separate

For confidentiality reasons, survey responses must never be matched to the personal details (e.g. name and address information). The best way to ensure this is to store name and address details separately from other personal details (e.g. gender, ethnicity) and from survey response data. For this reason, once the sample has been checked for deceased complainants and the list is finalised, names, postal addresses, email addresses must be removed from the sample file to a ‘mailing file’*. But before this information is removed, it is essential each complainant is provided with a unique number (URN) and that this

*The mailing file is included in this Toolkit.

number is available and correctly matched on the ‘mailing file’, the sample information file and the data entry file. Then you must transfer the names and address information for each complainant from the sample to your ‘mailing file’ – alongside the URN.

Save this new mailing file as ‘Complainant_mailing_data’. It should look similar to table 3 below.

This file should be used for mailing purposes: it will be used to check for deceased complainants prior to reminder mailings and will be cross-referenced with the data entry file to identify those who will need to be sent reminders*. This process is explained in more detail in the Survey implementation guide of this toolkit.

As this mailing file will only be used several times during the survey, we recommend you keep this file encrypted. The mailing file should be destroyed when the survey is complete.

Table 3 – Example of ‘Complainant_mailing data’ file

When the survey goes into field, you should ensure that checks for deceased records are conducted prior to each of the three mailing dates.

*The data entry file is used to record which questionnaires are returned completed, or are returned undelivered, or which complainants.