Healthcare Complaints Analysis Tool (HCAT) is a method for systematically analysing complaints, and grouping key insights reported within thousands of experiences reported by patients every year to healthcare institutions. The tool, which is free to use, allows staff to reliably determine the problems reported in complaints at three-levels of specificity; to grade their severity, the harm caused to patients, and where in the hospital system problems occurred.
“It is no pity to receive a well-founded complaint about healthcare. However, it is a pity to draw no learning from it!”
“Many of the organisations we work with spend significant resources ‘managing’ complaints, but recognise that they need to get better at learning from them. HCAT provides an evidence-based methodology, approach and system to facilitate this.”
“Complaints are often reviewed on an individual basis but we needed a strategy to collectively analyse several hundred narrative complaints received over 12 months. HCAT provided us with a free, user-friendly yet comprehensive method to categorise a vast quantity of narrative data in a systematic manner.”
“HCAT has proved to be a useful tool that has assisted us to better utilise complaints information to monitor and improve patient safety. Adding the HCAT dimension to our complaints analysis process has helped us identify where our systems and processes can be improved.”
All complaints at the hospital have been HCAT-coded since 2022 — “likely… the world’s largest sample of HCAT-scored complaints” (Bogh et al., 2023). Coding is supported by a Danish training and certification programme (Morsø et al., 2023).
HCAT domains and categories were built into VHIMS, the state-wide incident management system, in its July 2021 upgrade, and are used to classify complaints data (Street et al., 2022). The stage-of-care and harm modules are “currently not in use”.
A licensed HCAT derivative for analysing end-of-life care complaints is in routine use in the NHS (Walker & Dowling, 2024), who acknowledge Gillespie & Reader as “developers and licensors” of the tool.