When we will redirect your complaint
Sometimes we won't treat your concern as a customer complaint. This is usually if it would be better to address your complaint through one of our other formal processes.
This may be the case in the following situations.
Doctors with a statutory right of appeal
The Medical Act 1983 gives doctors the right to appeal some decisions about registration and training, licensing and revalidation, and fitness to practise.
Find out how to appeal these decisions.
Freedom of information or data protection issues
Complaints about these issues are handled by our Information Access team.
Find out how to access information.
Appealing the result of a Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board (PLAB) test
If you’ve taken the PLAB test and think your marks have been wrongly transcribed or want to appeal your result, you can do so.
Find out how to appeal your PLAB result.
Challenging a decision made about a doctor’s fitness to practise
If you’ve already raised a concern about a doctor’s fitness to practise but you don’t think we’ve reached the right decision. Or you have new information to provide, you can ask us to review our decision under our internal review process (‘Rule 12’). We can review the following decisions under Rule 12 of our Fitness to Practise Rules:
- Where we have decided not to investigate the concerns you raised
- Where we have taken no action at the end of an investigation
- Where we closed an investigation by issuing advice, agreeing undertakings or issuing a warning to the doctor
We can only review a decision under this process if there may be an error with the decision (a ‘material flaw’) or if there is new information. The decision should have been taken within the last two years. But we can review some older decisions in exceptional circumstances.
You can read more about our process in our Rule 12 FAQs document. We also have our FAQs document available in Welsh.
Complaints about how we’ve exercised our statutory functions
Sometimes, dealing with a complaint under our customer complaints procedure will interfere with our consideration of concerns about a doctor, or our investigation of their eligibility for registration; particularly where they are closely connected to the complaint.
When we think there's a risk of an adverse impact of that kind, we'll still address your concerns. But we may exercise our discretion to do so within the process in which you are already engaged, rather than separately, as a customer complaint.
