FOI 25-181 Clinical Practice Complaints
Freedom of Information Request
- Reference
- FOI 25-181 Clinical Practice Complaints
- Request Date
- 18 Apr 2025
- Response Date
- 15 May 2025
- Information Requested
The answers I'm looking for are to the following questions :-
* Number of complaints to SAS from the General Public regarding clinical practice (assessment & treatment) they received against road Paramedics, NQPs & Technicians?
* Number of complaints to SAS from hospitals relating to clinical judgement & treatment given to patients against road Paramedics, NQPs & Technicians?
* Number of complaints to Line Managers, ASMs regarding again clinical practice?
* Number of incidents progressing to 'Significant Adverse Event Report' (saers) caused by road crews? Finally...
* Number of legal suing cases have there been regarding clinical practice against SAS?
If possible can these numbers go back either 3 or 5 years
- Response
Public authorities are not required to create information in order to answer a request. There’s a distinction
between creating new information, and compiling information. Where a request can be answered by
compiling information from readily-available resources held by the public authority, this is not the same as
creating new information. However, if collation of the information would require skill and complex
judgement, the information is not held.It is for this reason we have applied section 17 of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act 2002, as information not held.
To help explain further, complaints on the system are held within defined categories; we do not have the dataset to search where the complaint came from, i.e the general public or hospitals; who the complaint was to (ASM’s, line managers etc) or have the category to search by ‘clinical practice’. To obtain this information we would have to look at every complaint made to the Scottish Ambulance Service and apply complex skill and judgement to each one to determine the information in your requests. This would extend to SAER’s and legal cases, as they are also not categorised in a way that would allow us to report on ‘caused by road crews’ or ‘clinical practice.
