Earlier this year, our Legal Entitlements and Problem-Solving (LEaP) Project supported a family who had been told that their son’s continence assessment had to take place at his school and that home assessments weren’t possible.
Help getting an assessment at home
We wrote a template letter to help the family make a complaint to the local NHS Trust and published separate versions for England and Wales on our website so that other families could use it too.
We’re pleased to report that the Trust wrote back to the family and confirmed that it could offer home visits for children who were too poorly to attend a clinic appointment. The Trust apologised to the family and told them not to hesitate to ask for a home visit if their son was too unwell to attend clinic appointments in future.
Help getting enough continence products
While the family was pleased to have a home assessment, they still struggled to get enough continence products for their son, who needed an average of 11 or 12 nappies a day. At first, the Trust said that it usually only provided 4 nappies a day, but it was prepared to increase this to 6 a day. When the family made a complaint, the Trust offered a ‘one off consignment’ of 8 nappies a day and said that it was unable to provide the 12 nappies a day that the family needed.
We supported the family to complain to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman that the amount of nappies being offered by the Trust was based on its own arbitrary limits, rather than their son’s actual assessed needs. As a result, the Trust agreed with the local clinical commissioning group that the CCG would ‘top up’ the Trust’s provision of nappies, so that the family’s needs were met.
The family said that our template letters made it much easier to deal with the Trust – they felt that they wouldn’t have had such a good outcome without getting support from the Project and finding out how to complain to the Ombudsman.
Can our LEaP Project help you?
If you’d like to challenge a decision made by your local continence service, use our template letters or fill in our online form to ask for support from the Project.
