Who evaluates us?

We are focussed on ensuring high-quality outcomes for the people we support and our work ethos is one of continuing improvement.

Our quality assurance processes monitor compliance with policies and procedures, evidence good practice, identify gaps and areas for improvement and drive learning.  The Adults’ Services Directorate Leadership Team led by the Director of Adults and Health oversees and has responsibility for assuring the quality of our services.

We are continuing our journey to become a learning organisation and have implemented regular quality assurance oversight meetings. These include the:

• Performance, Quality and Practice Board which provides strategic oversight
• Quality Assurance Management Board which monitors and upholds care practice and standards and is the quality assurance forum for heads of service and service managers
• Mental Health Quality Assurance Steering Group
• Lifelong Services Quality Assurance Steering Group
• Policy and Guidance Oversight Group which ensures that our policies and guidance for practitioners are current and in line with best practice.

Audits provide effective and objective monitoring of work to ensure that quality and consistency are maintained. We conduct these collaboratively with practitioners so that learning is delivered quickly and the emphasis remains on improvement. We are continuing to review our audit processes and framework to ensure that any areas requiring development are identified and plans put in place to address these.

Our ‘incident review’ procedures have been improved so that themes and trends are more easily identified. A panel now sits regularly to review incidents and to develop action plans to deliver improvements. We are also working closely with the NHS LeDeR (Learning from Lives and Deaths – People with a Learning Disability and autistic people) programme on their case reviews and developing joint action plans to address any areas for learning and for improvement.

 ‘Learning bulletins’ are issued regularly, so that the lessons captured as a result of incident reviews or from audits, can be shared quickly with operational staff.

Regular meetings have been established with our Customer Relations Team so that themes from complaints and compliments can be identified and understood. We are also reporting regularly on decisions made by the Local Government Ombudsman, and disseminating these across the service.

Comments, compliments and complaints

The number of formal complaints recorded (and closed) for Adults’ Services in 2022-23 was 305 (405 in 2021; 158 in 2020).

The significant fall in complaints closed during this period was expected following the spike in complaints in 2021 arising from financial reassessments resulting from the change in the Minimum Income Guarantee in 2021. (The Minimum Income Guarantee is the amount of people’s income that we do not count when working out how much they need to contribute towards the cost of their care.) Consideration of these complaints continued into 2022 and it is, therefore, anticipated that there will be a further drop in complaint numbers for 2023.

Adults’ Services also received 248 compliments from people using our services and their families in appreciation of our work throughout 2022 (233 in 2021; 229 in 2020).

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman recorded 32 decisions relating to Adults’ Services in 2022 (26 in 2021).  Ten of these decisions were upheld (in full or in part). Eight of the decisions found that the person had suffered injustice as a result of the identified maladministration.

Ten complaints were closed by the Ombudsman after initial enquiries with no further action taken: five were found to be not upheld after investigation; one was deemed to be out of jurisdiction; and a further three were considered to be ‘premature’, meaning they were passed to the Council to consider under our own complaints procedures. One complaint was withdrawn.

The Complaints Manager attends the Quality Assurance Management Board and the Performance, Quality and Practice Board to review learning from complaints to ensure that any service improvement is acted upon appropriately. Performance reports are provided to all senior managers on a weekly basis along with a quarterly report on all complaints casework and Freedom of Information Act requests.

The whole Council Complaints and Compliments report is available in the Our Complaints Performance section of the council’s website.

The channels below also make sure that we have ongoing feedback and are held to account