Duty of Candour

Morning All

I hope you are all well. I have a question in relation to Duty of Candour (DoC) In relation to formal complaints and the responses we send to service users, do any of you use these in executing your DoC statutory obligations, or do you write to the service users separately as per the guidance.

I have been advised by an individual that they have been using the formal complaint response as their statutory DoC response and not a separate letter. What are your thoughts? any advice or thoughts would be much appreciated.

Thanks 

@Ian Fearnley That's interesting - DoC for when harm has occurred identified through a complaint process? If the complaint shares information about 'harm' (cautious here) and an incident is there no triage/comms between patient safety with content & a check to see if incident reported, outcome from that incident review which may well have been a 'investigation' with DoC enacted through investigation process - if no then the the complaint may require full review via the patient safety approach rather than a complaint response. Enactment of DoC is different to responding to complaints where you would always say sorry for the experience they have had - so are people getting muddled? 

sorry if not clear