Agenda item

Report of the Corporate Director Children and Adults Services.

The Committee received a report of the Corporate Director Children and Adult Services which provided a summary of statutory representations relating to children’s and adults social care services during the period 1 April 2014 – 31 March 2015 (for copy see file of minutes).

The Complaints Officer CAS began by providing some background to complaints and the process by which they were managed. She advised that the main message from the Annual Report for 2014-15 was that statutory complaints fell by 23.1% from the previous year, as detailed within the report.  It was further reported that 176 complaints were received, in comparison with 229 in the previous year 70% of which related to children’s social care services and were resolved within the statutory timescale of up to 20 working days from receipt. This showed an improvement from the previous year’s figure of 58.7%. Of the total number of complaints received 44.9% were not upheld.

Further detail was reported regarding the predominant 3 categories of complaints as detailed within the report and it was interesting to note that Lack of Communication/ Information featured as an element in 24.4% of all CAS complaints.

The service continually strived to mitigate against complaints in the top 3 categories, and details of those actions were detailed on pages 131 and 138 of the report.

The Complaints Officer CAS advised that a benchmarking exercise had been undertaken with other Local Authorities in the North East region. The information received was summarised in the tables on pages 107-108 of the covering report, which showed that of the 10 authorities in the region which provided the requested information:-

·                                        Durham had the second lowest rate of children’s Stage 1 complaints (0.876) per 1000 population aged 0-19 years.

·                                        Durham had the second lowest percentage (5%) of children’s complaints progressing to Stage 2. This is an improvement on 2013/14 when Durham had the fourth lowest rate.

·                                        Durham had the fourth lowest rate of adult complaints (0.183) per 1000 population aged 18 and over. This is an improvement on 2013/14 when Durham had the fifth lowest rate.

It was noted that the data presented was anonymised and it was explained that this was due to the information being provided by colleagues in regional authorities on a reciprocal information sharing basis, prior to the information being published. It was further acknowledged that Members had in previous years, raised queries regarding why comparisons were not shown in relation to statistical rather than regionalneighbours, and it was reported that the team did not have similar arrangements with statistical neighbours for sharing unpublished information and therefore it had only been possible to gather any published comparator information, which referred to the previous reporting year 2013-14. 

It was noted that as the information was not relevant to the 2014-15 period which the representation report related to, it was not included within the main report. It was reported however that in 2013/14, in relation to the County’s 10 statistical neighbours in the children’s demographic, 7 local authorities had published the relevant information. Of those, Durham had received the fewest complaints per 1000, 0-19 population, and also had the second lowest percentage of stage 1 complaints taken to stage 2.

In relation to the 15 statistical neighbours in the adult’s demographic, 12 local authorities had published the relevant information. Of these, Durham had received the second fewestcomplaints per 1000 - 18+ population, with a rate of 0.216 complaints per person.

With regard to representations in the form of compliments about social care services, it was noted that they had increased by 23.9% in 2014/15 compared with the previous year, from 451 compliments to 559.

It was further reported that complaints which had been upheld or partially upheld, wherever possible were given actions and were identified for service improvement. The system thereby ‘closes the circle’ in relation to the journey of a complaint. Some examples of learning outcomes following investigation were detailed at points 24 and 25, of pages 109 -110 of the report.

In summary the Complaints Officer advised that during the period 2007-2012, there was an overall upward trend for complaints, followed by a reduction from the 2012 level in 2013/14. In 2014/15, the reduction in complaints continued, and total compliments increased. Members were further asked to note the content of the Annual report, provide any feedback and endorse the publication to key stakeholders of the Service.

Councillor Wilkes queried whether Corporate Issues was the most appropriate Committee to receive this report and felt that CYPS would be better equipped to receive this information. It was noted that complaints came under the remit of Corporate Issues and had been a previous function of the standards committee who had passed responsibility to CIOSC.

Councillor Martin made reference to the data presented regarding benchmarking, and added that he felt that the rank position was irrelevant and it was more important for the committee to receive information regarding the rate of complaints as this year had improved, although the rank position had not changed. Further discussion took place regarding this issue and it was agreed that the numbers were more important although it was still useful to display the ranking in the report.

Resolved:

That the content of the report be noted.