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The anaesthetic department should have confidential procedures in place that enable patients to feed back their views on their experience within the clinical service.¹⁰⁹

The anaesthetic service should collaborate with the hospital governance team to collate patient feedback.¹¹⁰

Information should be freely available to all patients on how to make suggestions for improvements.

All complaints should be acknowledged and appropriately reviewed in a timely fashion in line with local policy.¹¹¹

Any learning points from feedback and complaints should be identified and shared with all team members and other clinical services where relevant.

Feedback and learning points should be used to direct improvement plans where relevant.¹¹² These learning points should ensure that the objectives of these plans are met within an agreed timescale.

Support and advice should be provided to members of staff who are involved in a complaint to mitigate the negative impact that a complaint can have on staff.

Those who have made a complaint should be informed about changes made as a result of their complaint, and if appropriate, should form part of the review process.¹¹²

The department should encourage all staff to highlight concerns if they arise.

There should be clear processes on how to raise concerns, and how to escalate those concerns, for example, to the Freedom to Speak Up Guardian¹¹³. It should also be clear how concerns raised will be investigated, and what will happen with the findings following review.³⁹