This report is the third in a series of quarterly digests of summaries of our investigations. The short, anonymised stories it contains illustrate the profound impact that failures in public services can have on the lives of individuals and their families. The summaries provide examples of the kind of complaints we handle and we hope they will give users of public services confidence that complaining can make a difference.

Most of the summaries we are publishing are cases we have upheld or partly upheld. These are the cases which provide clear and valuable lessons for public services by showing what needs changing so that similar mistakes can be avoided in future. They include complaints about failures to spot serious illnesses and mistakes by government departments that caused financial hardship.

These case summaries will also be published on our website, where members of the public and service providers will be able to search them by keyword, organisation and location.

We will continue to work with consumer groups, public regulators and Parliament to use learning from cases like these to help others make a real difference in public sector complaint handling and to improve services.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/selected-summaries-of-investigations-by-the-phso-vol-3