We aim to provide an effective and efficient service at all times. Our performance as a regulator is regularly reviewed by the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence and we also welcome comments from those who use our services. Your feedback is valuable to us as we can use it to improve our services and therefore the service you receive in the future.
On this page there is information about our annual performance review, the recent audit of our fitness to practice processes, how to send us comments and complaints about the GOsC, and how to send us general feedback. There are separate complaints procedures for complaints about osteopaths and members of Council and committees.
In common with the eight other healthcare regulators, the GOsC is subject to external monitoring by the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence (CHRE). The CHRE reviews the performance of all the regulators every year, and presents its findings to Parliament, health ministers in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the public and patients, and the professional regulatory bodies. The performance review reports can be downloaded from the CHRE website. The most recent report, Changing regulation in changing times 2010/11, was published in July 2011.
In March 2010 the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence published an audit of all healthcare regulators’ early stages of handling complaints made by patients and the public.
The audit found that we deal with initial fitness to practise decisions effectively, and make ‘consistent decisions that are sound, that protect the public, and that should maintain public confidence in the regulation of the osteopathic profession’. Several areas of good practice were identified during the course of the audit, which also highlighted two areas where some enhancement was needed:
We are constantly reviewing our processes and procedures to ensure we deal with all fitness to practise complaints as efficiently and transparently as possible and the feedback from the audit will help us make future improvements.
For further information see our press release.
We welcome comments at any time via the Feedback facility in all sections of this website, the form on the Contact us page or by emailing us on info@osteopathy.org.uk. We would particularly like to hear from you if you have experienced exceptionally good customer service from us, or you feel someone deserves praise.
We aim to provide an effective and efficient service at all times but we recognise that, on occasion, we may fall short of the standards we set ourselves and what other people expect. We are committed to responding swiftly and efficiently to complaints about our service. As part of our commitment to improving the service we offer, we will endeavour to find out what happened, what may have gone wrong, how we can learn from this and how we will deal with similar situations in the future.
If you are not happy with the service we have provided, we would encourage you, wherever possible, to raise concerns directly with the member of staff you have been dealing with, or their manager. If this seems inappropriate, or if it is impossible to reach a resolution, there is a formal complaints procedure. This procedure is explained in our leaflet Making a complaint about the GOsC, which also includes a complaint form to use if you do send in a complaint. You can download the complaint form as a pdf document, which you can print out and post to us when completed, or as a Word document, which you can save on your computer, type into and email to us.
Please note that that to download the complaint form as a pdf (portable document format) you will need Adobe Reader version 7 or later on your computer. Click here to download a free copy of the latest Adobe Reader software.
If you need further information email corporatecomplaints@osteopathy.org.uk or phone the Chief Executive and Registrar’s office on 020 7357 6655 ext 246. There are separate procedures for complaints about osteopaths and complaints about members of the Council and committees.
We welcome comments and feedback about this website and the information on it. If you have any comments or if you have not been able to find the information you want in this section or on the website as a whole, please contact us by using the form on the Contact us page or by emailing info@osteopathy.org.uk.