If you think that one of your right as a patient has not been respected by a healthcare practitioner in a hospital, you may address yourself to the ombudsman service of that hospital.
If the healthcare practitioner in question works in a psychiatric hospital, in a sheltered accommodation or in a psychiatric rest home, it is possible that these facilities will call upon the ombudsman at the mental health care concertation platform of which they are a member.
The contact details of the local ombudsmen of each institution can be found in the lists below:
Tasks
· The ombudsman has as first task to promote communication between the patient and the healthcare practitioner thanks to preventive measures in order to prevent complaints.
· If a patient lodges a complaint with a competent ombudsman service because (s)he is of the opinion that one of his/her rights was not respected (e.g. lack of information on his/her state of health, difficulty to access to the health records or inadequate care quality), the mediation is an attempt to solve the disagreement with the cooperation of the patient and the healthcare practitioner.
· If the parties do not come to a solution, the ombudsman informs the complainant of other possibilities to deal with his/her request.
· In addition to distributing information relating to its own organization, the ombudsman service also formulates recommendations in the framework of its annual report to avoid certain dissatisfactions related to patients' rights being re-occurring. This report is submitted to the Communities and the Regions since Januari 1st 2016.