A patient complaint QR code for your clinic

In Punjab, the Healthcare Commission's guidance says a patient should first complain to the clinic in writing, unless the clinic has no complaint system, before taking it to the commission. A complaint to PHC has to be made within 60 days with a sworn affidavit. In Sindh, the SHCC complaint form asks patients to complain to the clinic within 30 days first, and the Islamabad Healthcare Regulatory Authority takes complaints within 60 days. Their inspection standards also ask clinics to keep a complaint register.

Complaints are worth hearing for their own sake. In a well-known US study, unsolicited patient complaints were a strong predictor of which doctors would later face malpractice claims, and a review of more than 88,000 complaints found they pointed to real safety problems. And a complaint about a long wait or a bill is much easier to settle at the reception desk than at the commission.

Go to Complaints, then Generate QR Code. Print the code and put it at reception or in the waiting area, or share and copy its link to send on WhatsApp. Each code shows how many times it has been scanned and how many complaints came through it, and you can delete one and make a new one at any time.

Scanning the code opens a short form in the phone's browser, with no app to install. The patient picks a category (medical care, staff behaviour, facilities, billing, wait time, communication or other), the department if it matters, and writes what happened. Their name and number are optional, so they can stay anonymous.

When they submit, they get a ticket number such as CPL-1792380064244. To stop misuse, the form allows a couple of complaints per hour from the same phone, and a link opened from the QR code works for 24 hours.

New complaints appear in the list by themselves, and the menu shows how many are still open. Open one to see the ticket, category, department, the patient's name or Anonymous, and what they wrote. Press Start Working when someone takes it on. To close it, write what you did and press Mark Resolved; the app won't resolve a complaint without a note, so the register always shows how each one ended.

The tabs filter by Not Resolved, New, In Progress and Resolved. The print button turns the whole register into an A4 report with the totals for each status and a table of every complaint and its resolution notes, which is what an inspector will want to see.

The patient can't check their ticket status online later, so if they left a number, call or message them when it's resolved. A complaint isn't linked to the patient's file automatically; the name is whatever the patient typed. And the app doesn't send you a push notification for each new complaint; keep an eye on the count in the menu.