Complaints Procedure

Write to the complaints address published at the foot of this website. You can write in English or Arabic, and you do not need any particular format or language — a plain description of what happened is enough, and nobody will be assessing how you have expressed it.

Include what you can: your enquiry reference if you have one, roughly when it happened, who you dealt with, what went wrong, and — the part people most often leave out — what you would like done about it. That last one genuinely helps. A complaint that says what a good outcome would look like is much easier to resolve than one that only describes the problem, and we would rather aim at the right thing.

If documents or messages are relevant, attach them. Screenshots of a conversation, a quotation, a contract or a bank confirmation are worth more than a description of them, and they let us look into it without a series of clarifying emails.

You can complain on behalf of somebody else — a family member who is unwell, or a patient who has died. Tell us your relationship to them. We will not use a technicality about authority to avoid looking into something serious, though for anything involving personal data we may need the patient's agreement or evidence that you are entitled to act for them.

And complaining costs nothing and changes nothing about how your case is handled. Nobody's enquiry gets slower because they raised a problem. If you have ever hesitated to complain for that reason, please do not.

We acknowledge a complaint within two working days, so that you know it arrived and who has it. An acknowledgement is not an answer, but not knowing whether a message reached anybody is its own kind of distress and it is easily avoided.

We aim to give a full written response within ten working days. Where a complaint needs information from a hospital in another country, that is sometimes not possible — centres reply on their own schedule — so if we are going to take longer we will tell you inside the ten days, explain why, and give you a date. What we will not do is let a complaint go quiet while we wait for somebody else.

The response will tell you what we found, what we concluded, and why. Where we were wrong, it will say so plainly rather than in the passive voice, and it will say what we have changed. Where we do not think we were wrong, it will explain the reasoning and show you what it is based on, because a conclusion without reasoning is not an answer you can do anything with.

If a complaint reveals a problem affecting more than one person — a page that misled several readers, a process that keeps failing — we fix the underlying thing rather than only the individual case. That is the main reason complaints are valuable to us: one person taking the trouble to write usually means several who did not.

And we keep a record of complaints and what came of them. Not to defend ourselves, but because a pattern is invisible unless somebody is looking at the whole set.

Patient complaints abroad are the hardest part of this page to write honestly, because the honest answer is not the one a frustrated patient wants.

The hospital that treated you is an independent organisation. It holds its own authorisation, its clinicians made their own decisions, and your treatment contract was with it under its country's law. A complaint about the care itself therefore lies against the hospital rather than against us, and no amount of goodwill on our part changes where the responsibility sits.

What we will not do is use that as a reason to stop being useful.

We will raise it with the centre directly, at a level above whoever you have been dealing with, and press for a substantive answer rather than a holding one.

We will help you get your records. You are entitled to your medical records in most jurisdictions, and getting them out of a foreign hospital is a task that defeats a lot of people. It should not, and we know how to ask.

We will tell you which regulator or health authority to approach, and what they can actually do. In Türkiye that is the Ministry of Health, which does investigate complaints about licensed facilities. Most countries have an equivalent, and most patients do not know it exists.

We will review our own part. If we told you something about that centre that turned out to be wrong, or introduced you to a hospital we should have known better than to introduce you to, that is our responsibility and we will say so.

And we will tell you honestly what we think your contract says, including when we think it does not say what you hoped. That is more useful than encouragement.

Say so, and ask for it to be looked at again by somebody who was not involved the first time. That is a real step rather than a formality — a second reader with no stake in the original conclusion catches things, and complaints do get overturned that way.

Beyond that, several routes exist that do not depend on us at all, and you are entitled to use any of them without asking us first.

For anything about your personal information, your national data protection authority takes complaints directly. In the European Economic Area that is the supervisory authority where you live or work, in the United Kingdom it is the Information Commissioner's Office, and in Türkiye it is the Personal Data Protection Authority. You do not need to have complained to us first, though it usually helps.

For clinical care or a facility, the health ministry or medical regulator of the country where you were treated is the body with actual power over a hospital.

For a consumer or contractual dispute, the consumer protection authority in your own country can often advise, and within the EU the European Consumer Centres Network helps specifically with cross-border problems.

For anything involving an offer to buy or sell an organ, the police. That is not a complaint, it is a crime report, and our ethical sourcing policy explains it.

We would rather resolve something ourselves than have you go elsewhere. But a complaints procedure that positions itself as the only door is not a complaints procedure, and telling you the alternatives is part of taking the process seriously.