Ombudsman’s Annual Report highlights impact on care
What has improved?
The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has role in looking at social care complaints. It has been working to reduce the time it takes to make initial investigations about whether it can and should investigate someone’s complaint in more detail.
The Ombudsman’s investigations have improved the quality of local services for everybody. Councils and care providers agreed to 1,967 Ombudsman recommendations targeted at improving their services. Service improvement recommendations are actions like:
- changing policies and procedures
- reviewing other people’s cases for potential injustice
- training staff
- enhancing public information about services.
What else has the Ombudsman done?
Last year, the Ombudsman continued to publish reports to share the learning from its investigations. These included a report on how councils and care providers responded to the upheavals to service delivery because of Covid-19, which includes some 90 case studies from the Ombudsman’s investigations.
I’m very pleased we made great strides in improving the speed of our initial investigations last year. The quicker we decide whether we can or should look into someone’s complaint, the quicker people have certainty about their situation.
How can I make a complaint about social care?
The starting point is to raise the problem or issue locally. How to do this will depend on the type of care and who is paying for it (funding it).
AgeUK have useful information on their website.
AgeUK care problems information
Or contact the Healthwatch Coventry information service
How many complaints did the Ombudsman deal with?
In 2021-22, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman dealt with a total of 49,625 contacts from the public. Of this, 32,091 people received help on the telephone without requiring a case to be logged.
6,607 cases were dealt with by an initial investigation, mainly looking at whether the Ombudsman can and should investigate in more detail.
It dealt with 4,253 cases through a detailed investigation, of which it upheld 66% (2,825 in number).
