Governance & Quality

Mission statement

The Maitland Clinic aims to provide the best possible hair restoration treatment available anywhere in the world. This means that we use the most advanced surgical techniques and technology, combined with painstaking attention to detail and aesthetics, and a culture of lifelong patient care.

The founding principle of The Maitland Clinic is that each patient should be provided with the full individual attention and care of highly qualified medical professionals, to ensure that he or she can enjoy a lifetime of completely natural-looking hair.

We strive to provide safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and continuously reflect on the service that we provide in order to improve the experience for our patients and staff.

Candour is defined in the Robert Francis report as:

“The volunteering of all relevant information to persons who have or may have been harmed by the provision of services, whether or not the information has been requested and whether or not a complaint or a report about that provision has been made.”

At The Maitland Clinic, we openly support the Duty of Candour and will always strive to be open, honest and transparent. We support the ‘Being Open’ policy and actively encourage our staff to be truthful in their dealings with patients if things go wrong. We want all incidents and complaints to be investigated and any lessons learned from this process to be shared within the organisation and with patients.

We believe that good governance fosters inward facing scrutiny, honesty and transparency. We ensure that our directors comply with the ‘fit and proper persons test’ and aspire to being a well led CQC regulated organisation.
We actively support whistleblowing and want to know if things are not quite right so that we can make them so.

Our patients expect and deserve that our organisation and our individual practitioners to be honest, open and truthful in all our dealings with them and we have put in place the systems and processes to enable this. We have a sub-committee of the senior management team called the Quality, Governance, Patient Safety and Risk Committee. This committee meets 6 monthly and discusses all of the areas within its name, and we invite a staff representative to join this committee to ensure we are engaging with our entire team.

We continually strive to be an open and honest organisation. One of the ways we achieve this is by asking our patients to feedback the about their experience in a post-procedure questionnaire. We also carry out staff audits and we listen. ‘You say we did’ is how we implement what our patients and staff inform us in their feedback.

Our overall ambition is to provide the highest quality hair transplantation and we welcome ongoing feedback and engagement to help ensure we remain instigators for excellence in healthcare provision.

Interpreting and translation services

At The Maitland Clinic, we are committed to providing high-quality healthcare services to all of our patients, regardless of their language or communication needs. As part of this commitment, we recognise the importance of providing medical interpreters and sign language communication during consultations to ensure effective communication and understanding between patients and healthcare providers. We strive to make these services readily available to all patients who require them and will take all necessary steps to ensure that language and communication barriers do not prevent our patients from receiving the care they need. Please let us know if you would like interpreting or translation services during your consultation or procedure with us at The Maitland Clinic.

Independent Doctors Federation and ISCAS Service

Definition of complaint

Any communication involving goods or a service that requires an investigation and formal response. Complaints may be made by letter or e-mail or text.

Process

If you are unhappy with the facilities or services you have received from Dr Edward Ball at the Maitland Clinic, we would like to know about it as soon as possible so we can investigate your concerns and explain, apologise and take positive action where necessary. In most circumstances, if you tell us about your concern quickly, we can resolve matters straightaway. To let us know about something with which you are unhappy please speak with the clinic manager.

If you are not fully satisfied you can put your concerns in writing and use our formal Complaint Resolution Procedure which meets with the requirements set out by the Independent Doctors Federation (IDF) for its members and also the Independent Sector Complaints Adjudication Service (ISCAS).

Please note that the 3 stage process only relates to complaints made regarding Dr Edward Ball (i.e. IDF member).

The Complaint Resolution Procedure has three stages and reflects the principles of the ISCAS Code of Practice:
Stage 1: Local resolution within the individual practice
Stage 2: IDF Complaint Resolution Procedure to review the complaint
Stage 3: Independent Adjudication from ISCAS
Please note that Stages 1, 2 and 3 fall within the ISCAS Code of Practice for Complaints Management.

A full copy of the patient guide can be obtained by clicking on the link below:

ISCAS Patient Guide For Making A Complaint

The Maitland Clinic full complaints policy is available on the link below as well as in the paper copy of our patient information handbook at the clinic:

Complaints Policy

Scope

Attention is drawn to the sections of the ISCAS Code (page 5 & 6) which clearly explain what the Code does and does not cover. You should understand that if the complaint is not covered by the ISCAS code then stages 2 and 3 will not be available.

Additional information for patients about ISCAS can be found at: https://iscas.cedr.com/

Additional information for patients about the IDF can be found at: IDF – www.idf.co.uk