How to report a complaint or concern about a community provider

Types of concerns

Patient safety or quality of care issues

You can report any patient safety or quality of care concerns you have about your community provider. These are serious concerns about the medical care you received that may have caused you harm.

Here are some examples:

• Surgical errors or complications
• Misdiagnoses or delayed diagnoses
• Mistakes with your medication
• Unsafe procedures
• Abuse, assault, or criminal behavior by your provider

Quality of service complaints

You can also report any service complaints about your provider. These are concerns about how your provider or their office staff treated you.

Here are some examples:

• Rude or unprofessional behavior
• Poor communication or confusing instructions
• Long wait times
• An unclean office
• Policies or practices that seem unfair or don’t make sense

How to report a complaint or concern

You can report a complaint or concern about your community provider in 1 of these 2 ways:

Option 1: Contact your VA patient advocate

You can report a concern by contacting your VA medical center’s patient advocate. Patient advocates are highly trained professionals who work to support the rights of Veterans and their family who receive care through VA.

Find your nearest VA medical center

Your patient advocate will work with the VA medical center’s community care office to review the complaint or concern and take one or both of these actions:

• Submit a report of the concern or complaint to the third-party administrator for the community care network region of the provider.
• Report the concern or complaint to the VA medical center patient safety manager for any needed corrective action.

We’ll contact you about what action the patient advocate is taking to resolve the concern or complaint.

Option 2: Contact a community care third-party administrator

You can submit a complaint directly to the third-party administrator for the community care network region of the provider. We work with 2 companies (Optum and TriWest) to manage the different regions of the network.

Find your community care network region

If your third-party administrator is Optum:

• Report safety and quality of care concerns on the Optum website
• Report service complaints on Optum’s VA community care Veteran portal
  You’ll need to sign in to submit your concern.

If your third-party administrator is TriWest:

• Report safety and quality of care concerns using the health care quality concern form.
  Download the health care quality concern form from the TriWest website (PDF)
• Report service complaints using the complaint/grievance form.
  Download the complaint/grievance form from the TriWest website (PDF)

Once you submit your concern to your third-party administrator, they may contact you to get more information.