This procedure is for Adult Social Care complaints – the council is bound to comply to this procedure as a legal duty.
As of April 2009, there is a duty to cooperate between different agencies, for example councils, primary care trusts and others to resolve issues effectively and quickly.
The procedure involves the following:-
We will acknowledge your complaint within three working days.
We will agree with you an action plan and timescale, which may involve a mediation meeting.
We will fully investigate the issues within the agreed timescale, following which we will send you a full response.
Our commitment to you
If you make a complaint, we will:
- Acknowledge your complaint within three working days
- Ask you what outcome you want
- Try, if possible, to resolve the problem immediately, and apologise to you if we are at fault
- Confirm with you the issues that need to be dealt with and deal with all of them
- Confirm with you, depending on the complexity of the complaint and whether it involves other agencies, which organisation/agency you wish to be the main respondent to you
- Obtain the necessary permission from you to gain access to relevant records to investigate your complaint and, if necessary, your permission to share that information with relevant bodies to seek a resolution
- Agree an action plan and timescale with you
- Agree to respond to you by your preferred method of contact, for example by letter or telephone
- Keep in touch with you throughout the process
- Wherever possible, offer a solution to resolve the complaint, and let you know what you can do if you are still unhappy after receiving our response
- We aim to use this process to learn and improve
- At the end of the process we will ask you for feedback on how we handled your complaint – this is not intended to reopen issues but to check that we kept to our complaint handling commitment
If you are still unhappy
If you want to take your complaint further you can then contact the Local Government Ombudsman at:-
The Local Government Ombudsman
PO Box 4771, Coventry CV4 0EH
Call the Advice Team on 0300 061 0614 or 0845 602 1983
Email advice@lgo.org.uk
Fax: 024 7682 0001
Text ‘callback’ to 0762 480 4299
You can contact the Ombudsman at any point. However, it is their usual practice not to deal with a complaint themselves until the council’s complaints procedure has been completed.