Ombudsman reports 14% increase in care complaints

28 May 14
Complaints about adult social care increased by 14% over the last year to stand at nearly 2,500, with the vast majority about council-delivered services, the local government ombudsman has said today.

By Richard Johnstone | 28 May 2014

Complaints about adult social care increased by 14% over the last year to stand at nearly 2,500, with the vast majority about council-delivered services, the local government ombudsman has said today.

Publishing complaint statistics for all English adult social care providers today, the LGO said 40% of complaints came from 25 councils. East Sussex County Council was the authority with most complaints against it – 63 from the initial 2,456 registered complaints and enquiries. This was followed by 29 complaints against the London borough of Redbridge and 28 against Bromley and Ealing in the capital and Wirral borough council.

For the first time, the ombudsman has also published complaint data for private social care providers as well as those run by local authorities. However, 86% of the complaints received were made against services delivered by the 152 local authorities responsible for delivering social care in England, with a further 3% covering services commissioned. Around 9% were made against private providers.

The most frequent complaints concerned assessments for care and planning of provision, which were raised in 442 cases, followed by concerns over fees, grants and payments (429).

Ombudsman Jane Martin said the data suggested there was more to do for providers to improve their complaint handling before issues reached her office. The ombudsman can only consider complaints once they have been made to the provider itself and the outcome is deemed unsatisfactory by the complainant. Last year, 1,846 cases were brought forward for investigation.

‘Over the last few years there have been a number of reviews that have looked at healthcare complaints. We must not wait for a crisis in adult care to examine more closely the way social care commissioners and providers deal with complaints,’ Martin said.

‘I hope that by publishing these statistics, I will encourage care providers to scrutinise their approach to ensure that the public are given a complaints process that is easy to access, effective and accountable.’

Improving the handling of complaints and using the data to improve services should be at the heart of how the performance of care providers is measured, Martin said. Each should be mandated to provide information about the pattern of complaints to the Care Quality Commission, to mirror a recommendation for the NHS from the Francis Inquiry into failings at the Mid Stafford hospital trust.
The CQC is currently considering implementing this change, and Martin said she would work with it to strengthen the information received and drive improvements.

Andrea Sutcliffe, chief inspector of adult social care at the CQC, welcomed the report.

‘When we look at whether services are safe, caring, effective, responsive and well led we will be considering how well complaints are handled and acted upon. This will help to inform our judgement of whether services are outstanding, good, require improvement or inadequate,’ she added.

However, a Local Government Association spokeswoman warned that only using complaint data risked misrepresenting the quality of provision.

‘Whilst this report recognises that higher numbers of complaints does not indicate poorer services or less effective complaint handling, basing statistics exclusively on the number of complaints without consideration of how they are handled risks seriously misrepresenting what is accurately happening on the ground in local councils.

‘In reality, 60% of the authorities named in this report have below the average percentage of complaints upheld by the ombudsman.’

Spacer

CIPFA logo

PF Jobsite logo

Did you enjoy this article?

AddToAny

Top