New data from the General Optical Council’s annual report has shown that complaints against registered practitioners has increased by 48 per cent in 2014/15.
The regulator received a total of 287 complaints between the registration year time frame of April 1 2014 and March 31 2015. Of the complaints received, 279 resulted in full investigations being opened. The figures mean that nearly 1 per cent (0.98) of the total number of registrants have been the subject of a complaint during the 12-month registration period.
On the potential reasons for the increase, the GOC said: ‘There is no one specific driver that we have been able to identify and it would appear to be consistent with increases in levels of complaints experienced across most healthcare regulators.
‘Less than one per cent of those registered with us were subject to complaints about their fitness to practise during the period covered by this report and, of these, even fewer were referred for a formal hearing. The vast majority of our registrants provide an excellent service to patients and will never be subject to any action on their registration.’
Sixty-nine per cent (193) of the complaints were made against OOs and 14 per cent (31) were made against DOs. Complaints against business registrants made up 11 per cent (38) of the total, an increase of 58 per cent compared to 2013/14.
Of the types of complaints received, personal conduct related to 15 per cent (43) of the cases, ahead of ‘other clinical’ (10 per cent), spectacle prescriptions (9 per cent) and convictions or cautions (8 per cent). Other notable complaint types included 11 allegations of unregistered testing and 10 fraud cases.