Every year, we survey the adult social care sector to find out how it uses our investigations and resources to help improve services.

If you are an independent care provider (or a provider representative organisation), we’d love to hear from you.

Please fill out our short survey, and let us know your thoughts and experiences on managing complaints. There’s also opportunity to suggest topics for future newsletters.

The survey closes on 27 March 2020 - it should only take 10 minutes to complete.

We will feed back the results in a future newsletter.

Fill in the survey

The Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI), in collaboration with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), has produced a new guide for registered managers and care home owners.

We were given the opportunity to input into this document, which is aimed at improving complaints handling by people who work within, or own, care homes. It contains details of the law and relevant bodies and procedures. 

Read more

We have had the power to investigate complaints about independent care providers for more than 10 years.

If we find a care provider at fault, and they do not agree to our recommendations to put things right, we will publish a report (called an Adverse Findings Notice) about our investigation.

It's incredibly rare that we have to go to such lengths, as most care providers agree to our recommendations. But over the past few months we have issued two such notices against homes in Kent and Yorkshire.

In the first case, we heavily criticised Kent care provider, Foxley Lodge Care Ltd, after it suddenly raised its fees – and then threatened to evict a vulnerable resident if her family did not pay.

In the second case, Burlington Care Ltd refused our recommendation to refund the full cost of a woman's care, after our investigation - and that of its local council - found care workers had verbally abused and neglected a woman while in its care. The company instead offered to refund just one week's stay.

It was not until the afternoon before we were due to speak to BBC Radio 4 about the case that the company agreed to refund the full amount.

We have shared our findings about both care providers with care regulator, the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

• Care home threatens to evict patient if family refused to pay 25% fee increase
• Care home owners refuse to refund family despite investigation finding mother was neglected

As you are aware CQC are the regulatory body for adult social care services. They produce guidance explaining how care providers should comply with regulated activities.

We investigate complaints from people, who arrange and fund their own care, about adult social care providers who are carrying out regulated activities which are, or can be, registered with CQC.

Our two organisations have an Information Sharing Agreement and a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to ensure that together we work towards protecting vulnerable adults and improving the quality of care delivered by registered providers.

A regulatory inspection gives a snapshot of aspects of an establishment or organisation at a given time. It does not prove that, because an organisation ‘passed with flying colours’ three months ago, service failures could not happen. Similarly, a satisfactory inspection made just after an alleged event took place does not automatically mean the failures complained of could not have happened. Services to individuals can always go wrong, regardless of how good a regulatory inspector may consider an organisation or service provider to be.

When we have completed an investigation, if we have identified a potential breach in fundamental standards we will share the final decision with CQC. This is used by them to analyse themes and risk factors to add to the risk profile for inspectors and evaluate upheld complaints against other factors.

Read the MOU

As a care provider, you may be delivering services on behalf of a local authority. We provide more information about how local authorities are performing on our council performance map.

Launched last year, the interactive map gives you the chance to see how your local authority is performing at the click of a button.

You can see the decisions we have made about your local authorities and the service improvements we have recommended to them, along with how well they have complied with those recommendations.

New decisions are loaded to the map every week - so it's well worth bookmarking the site and checking back regularly to see what we have added.

View the map