Adult social care complaints policy

How we will handle your complaint

If you make your complaint orally to a service and they can resolve your complaint by the end of the next working day, we will not record your complaint.

In all other cases, we will acknowledge your complaint within three working days after the day you submitted your complaint.

If you have complained to us by phone or through a face-to-face meeting, we will summarise our understanding of your complaint and send this to you in writing, also within three working days.

We may need to contact you to listen to what you have to say and to understand what your problems or concerns are.

Our complaints process takes a proportionate approach to handling complaints so that we focus on resolving complaints quickly. This is better for you, and more cost effective for us. Our complaints process has two steps: early resolution and investigation.

Early resolution

After we have acknowledged your complaint, an officer from the service you have complained about will speak to you to understand how we can resolve your complaint quickly without the need for a detailed investigation into what happened.

This may include:

• providing mediation
• putting services in place, changing your service provider, or completing a new Care Act Assessment
• an apology
• a remedy, including a financial payment where appropriate

If you agree to our suggested resolution, we will confirm the details in writing and close your complaint.

We will normally try and resolve your complaint within 20 working days from the date we received your complaint.

Investigation

If we can’t resolve your complaint within 20 working days, or you don’t agree to any suggested remedy, we will ask an officer who was not directly involved in the matters complained about to complete an investigation into your complaint.

That officer will provide a written response setting out our final decision. This will include whether your complaint is upheld, partially upheld, or not upheld. If appropriate, we will explain how we will propose to put things right and how we will learn from our mistakes.

The officer’s investigation will be proportionate, and a full investigation may not always be necessary. In some cases, our reply will state only the facts as we understand them and our final decision. We will determine the detail of our investigation based on the seriousness of the issues raised, the complexity of the complaint, and the impact any potential fault has had on you and others.

We will send our response as soon as we know what our final decision is and won’t wait until any remedy or actions are completed.

We will send our response by no later than six months from the date we received your complaint. In some circumstances, we may need longer than six months to complete our investigation, and in those circumstances, we will explain the reasons why and give a timeline for when you can expect our reply.

Changing your mind following early resolution

If you initially agree to a remedy offered during the early resolution step but subsequently change your mind, we will review the original resolution and any new or relevant information you provide.

If you have provided new information which means the agreed remedy is no longer appropriate, and we think a full investigation is warranted, we will escalate your complaint to the investigation step.

If we don’t agree that any new information you have provided warrants an investigation, we will signpost you to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman.

If you don’t provide any new information and have simply changed your mind, we will signpost you to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman.

If you are raising any issues about how the remedy was implemented – such as a promised action not being completed or being completed inadequately – we will log these issues as a new complaint.

Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman

After your complaint has completed our process, you can then ask the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (the Ombudsman) to review your complaint.

You usually have up to 12 months to do this, starting from the date you first made your complaint. The Ombudsman will normally only consider complaints made within that time but can decide to look at older complaints if there is a good reason to do so.

The Ombudsman looks at individual complaints about councils, all adult social care providers (including care homes and home care agencies) and some other organisations providing local public services. It investigates matters fairly and impartially and is free to use.

There are some matters the Ombudsman cannot or will not investigate. In these cases it will explain clearly the reason for its decision.

When you contact the Ombudsman, you should provide a copy of your original complaint and details of any early resolution and our final decision.