We so often see posters on here reporting unfair experiences over diagnosis I wondered if people were sufficiently aware of the NHS Have your Say - Friends & Family questionnaire
The mechanism is in place, along with a complaints procedure, to monitor the effectiveness of health services. You should be able to find this in every GP surgery, dentist, health clinic and hospital department.
The friends and family form is supposed to be collected once a month, and the statistics sent in to the NHS, where statistics for services are produced every six months and compared with previous sets of returns, across all other practices in a health service area. The form asks if you would recommend the service to anyone else. There is a box in which to write comments, and the forms now have statistics like age, gender, ethnic origin and disability.
The facility means you can anonymously make known if you were dissatisfied with treatment received. You should be able to ask for the form at any reception desk and put your completed form in a suggestions box (usually a blue one) that is readily visible. They should also be downloadable from the service website.
Under the same rules, if you make a complaint, the service must report up to NHS how they handled complaints. Hence even if they give you an unsatisfactory response, the fact of the complaint goes into a central system and services are compared in terms of how they responded.
The objective is to give patients more say in the NHS services they receive.
The system is of course open to abuse. Some GP practices and other services aren't putting up the posters or making the facility easy to access, and that seems particularly so with services other than GPs. Also it is tempting to make up responses using bogus "friends" or delete/destroy unfavourable forms.
However a practice that keeps doing this is going to look obvious if complaints start appearing through other routes. The fact the practice hasn't shown the difficulty through the Friends & Family questionnaires would flag up especial concerns.
So if you aren't being given access to diagnoses, or being fobbed off over support, at least use "Friends and Family" and also complain.