On this page we explain what happens after we have received a complaint. There is information about complaint hearings on the Hearings page and detailed information about what happens during a hearing on the page Attending a hearing.
When we have received a completed complaints form, an independent osteopath will carefully study your complaint to make sure it is something we can deal with. Our aim is to have cases screened within three weeks of receiving the complaint. We will contact you if we need to check any details.
The independent osteopath will not reject your complaint without talking to a lay member (someone who is not an osteopath) of the General Osteopathic Council.
If we find that we can't deal with your complaint, we will contact you and tell you why. It may be that your allegations do not amount to a breach of professional standards, because they are not relevant to the work of the osteopath, or because there is unlikely to be sufficient evidence to support the complaint.
Once we agree to investigate a complaint, we usually contact the osteopath you have complained about, send them the details of your complaint and ask for a response. We might need to ask for information from other people as part of the investigation. For example, if your complaint relates to your medical condition we might need to look at copies of your medical records from other practitioners, such as your doctor.
Then we ask our Investigating Committee to look at all the information that has been collected. Our aim is for the Investigating Committee to do this within four months of your complaint being received. This committee is made up of osteopaths and lay members (non-osteopaths) and chaired by a lay person. They may ask for more information from you, the osteopath or other people, such as your doctor.
The committee will decide whether all the information collected supports your complaint and whether the allegations would amount to any of the following:
If the Investigating Committee believes that the complaint does not indicate any of these, they will find that there is no case to answer and your complaint won’t be looked at any more. We will tell you why the committee made this decision. But if the committee finds that there is a case to answer, we will arrange a public hearing and instruct our solicitors to prepare the case against the osteopath.
If the complaint concerns an osteopath's professional conduct or competence, or a criminal conviction that is relevant to his/her work, it will be heard by the Professional Conduct Committee. Our aim is to hold the hearing within nine months of it being referred by the Investigating Committee. See the Hearings section for more information about hearings and what happens after a hearing.
Complaints about an osteopath's mental or physical health are passed to the Health Committee, which is made up of osteopaths and non-osteopaths and at least one registered medical practitioner.
This committee can look at cases without having a hearing. It meets in private because it has to consider an osteopath’s medical condition.
If there are serious worries about the osteopath’s health, the committee may require the osteopath to meet certain conditions. It can also stop the osteopath from working for a set time by suspending their registration.
