We would like to invite care providers to complete our annual feedback survey, which is now open.

We run this survey to learn more about where our work is having an impact, what parts of our service you have found helpful, and any feedback you may have on how we can improve.

The survey can be found here: Care Provider Survey 2020-21 and will remain open till 11 April 2021.

If you have thoroughly considered a complaint, and the complainant remains unhappy, you should tell them about us in your final complaint response.

While many care providers do this, we know there are still some who are either signposting clients to the wrong place, or not doing so at all.

In our annual review of adult social care complaints, we called for the government to introduce mandatory signposting to us as part of the planned social care reforms.

If you are unsure how to refer clients to us when they have completed your complaints process, we have a number of guides and templates on our website.

Read our annual review of complaints

We regularly update our advice and guidance both to local authorities and independent care providers.

If you need advice on dealing with a complaint as we, hopefully, start to come out of the pandemic, the guidance we issued on Good Administrative Practice during the response to COVID-19 at the time of the first lockdown will still hold firm.

We have also updated our Guidance on Effective Complaint Handling for local authorities. While aimed at local authorities, these principles are relevant for all complaint handling:

• Getting it right - do the simple things well, by complying with the law and following your own policies.
• Being customer focused - would you be clear on what to do? Make your complaints process easy to find and use, and keep complainants informed.
• Being open and accountable - there should be no surprises. Your processes should be transparent. Be honest when things have gone wrong.
• Acting fairly and proportionately - explain your thinking. Base your decisions on sound evidence and clearly explain why they were made.
• Putting things right - make amends. If you have done something wrong, apologise and take steps to put right any injustice caused.
• Seeking continuous improvement - complaints are a great learning tool. Put systems in place to capture the lessons, which will help improve your services.

Last April saw our training programme come to an abrupt halt due to COVID-19. While we would love to return to face to face delivery, we recognise this is not going to happen for some time.

Our Effective Complaint Handling for Care Providers course is now available as a live online workshop. We’ve shortened the training to two and a half hours, keeping the core elements of the course and making it as practical as possible. The course covers how to identify and investigate complaints, put things right when they go wrong while learning from your findings. It’s an ideal course for staff and managers who investigate and respond to complaints.

Read more