Complaints Procedure

If you have a complaint or concern about the service you have received from our optometrists or any of our staff, please let us know. We operate a practice complaints procedure as part of a NHS system for dealing with complaints. Our complaints system meets national criteria. We also participate in the Optical Consumer Complaints Service (OCCS), which deals with complaints about non NHS matters. Their address is shown on the following page.

How to complain
We hope that most problems can be resolved easily and quickly, at the time they arise and with the person concerned. If your problem cannot be resolved in this way and you wish to make a complaint, we would like you to let us know as soon as possible - ideally, within a matter of days or at most a few weeks - because this will enable us to establish what happened more easily. If it is not possible to do that, please let us have details of your complaint:

• within 6 months of the incident that caused the problem, or
• within 6 months of discovering that you have a problem, provided this is within 12 months of the incident.

Complaints can be submitted online or if sent by post, should be addressed to Sue Bolton, Complaints Administrator, 41 Western Road, Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, TN40 1DT. Please be as detailed as possible about your complaint.

Complaining on behalf of someone else
Please note that we keep strictly to the rules of clinical confidentiality. If you are complaining on behalf of someone else, we have to know that you have their permission to do so. A note signed by the person concerned will be needed, unless they are incapable (because of physical or mental illness) of providing this.