A Fife medical practice has been forced to apologise to a grieving son over the treatment his late mother received.
A doctor was found to have used an “insensitive” term to refer to the woman.
Concerns led the Fife man known only as Mr C to take his complaint to the Scottish ombudsman, who demanded the practice provide him with a written apology and feed back the failings in the case to staff to ensure a similar situation does not happen in the future.
The incident happened when Mr C complained about a number of aspects of the care and treatment the practice provided for his late mother.
This included a delay of six weeks in referring Mrs A to a specialist after a doctor had assured Mr C during a home visit that this would be done.
Mr C also complained that when another doctor at the practice saw his mother at home at a later date, he failed to arrange for her to be admitted to hospital and made an inappropriate reference to her condition.
The Fife man said the practice failed to take his mother’s deteriorating condition seriously and provide her with appropriate care.
After obtaining independent advice from a medical adviser who is a GP, the ombudsman upheld his complaints.
The adviser said he would have expected the first GP to have set a time to see Mrs A and go over blood tests and review her condition but this did not happen.
The ombudsman stated: “In our view, the term he used was insensitive and would likely have added to the distress Mr C was experiencing at that time.
“Having correctly decided not to admit Mrs A to hospital, it then appeared that this doctor failed to assess her social situation at the visit, although we accepted that, overall, the practice acted reasonably in trying to get social work involved in her case.”