Adult social care complaints

How to make a complaint about adult social care services.

If you are unhappy about one of our services we would like you to tell us about it. Contacting us won't have a negative affect on the service you receive. We welcome any feedback that helps us improve and maintain high standards. We will deal with all complaints fairly and sensitively.

How to complain about a home care service

Home care providers will provide you with information about how to complain if you're not happy with the service.

Usually issues can be resolved with a simple phone call to the provider’s office.

You can ask us for help if you receive care from an approved provider and you're not satisfied with the response to your complaint. We can help you to make a complaint or approach a provider on your behalf.

If you still can't resolve your complaint, we can help you to change providers or make different arrangements for your care.

Who can complain

You can make a complaint if:

  • You receive an adult social care service.
  • You believe you have been unfairly refused a service.
  • You are a friend or a family member of someone who receives a service (or believes they should). You can make a complaint on their behalf. You will need to get their permission first.

How we deal with adult social care complaints

Informal Stage

If you have a complaint, you can tell someone you know from the service and they will try to resolve the problem promptly. Alternatively you can contact the service here.

If you don’t feel your complaint can be resolved by the service, or if local resolution has failed, you can contact the Customer Feedback Team directly.

Formal complaint - first stage

If your complaint relates to social care you should expect to receive a response within 25 working days. If your complaint is complex or covers a number of areas, we may take longer to respond, however, we will tell you if we think this is likely to be the case.

When we receive your complaint we will pass it to a manager for the service you are unhappy with.

The investigating manager will gather and review all of the evidence to get a clear picture of what has happened.

Once the complaint has been looked into they will write to you to explain the outcome of the investigation and what we intend to do to resolve the problem.

If you are not satisfied with the response you can contact the Customer Feedback Team who will look at the response and your comments and decide if the service needs to do more to put things right. If this is the case we will contact you to tell you what else we intend to do to resolve your complaint. If we believe the service has done all they reasonably can do we will write to advise you of this.

Formal complaint – Independent Review

If you are not satisfied with the council’s response to your complaint you have the right to contact the Local Government Ombudsman to discuss your concerns.