We're reiterating our call for all care providers to be required to tell people about our service in our review of the adult care complaints we received in 2023-24.

In the past year we've received a relatively small number of cases about the independent sector. The number of complaints about privately funded and arranged care has dropped by 15%, following a continued trend over the past few years.

Given the sector's proportion of the care market, we would expect this figure to be much higher.

In 2023-24, we received 2,982 complaints about adult care, with just 333 of those being from people who fund their own care.

To bridge the gap between the number of people in receipt of care in the independent sector, and the low volume of complaints, we are calling for signposting to our service to be made mandatory at the end of every provider’s complaint process.

Read more

Our Ombudsman, Amerdeep Somal, spoke at an online event, hosted by the National Care Forum, on the day we launched our review of Adult Social Care Complaints.

This was an important opportunity for us to speak directly to the care sector about our findings and our expectations for good complaint handling. Amerdeep was joined by colleagues from our Investigation teams to share examples of good and bad practice we had found through our investigations.

We received positive feedback from delegates about our work as well as suggestions of how we can work more closely with the sector in future to improve standards of complaint handling and service delivery.

We have re-launched our complaint handling resources for independent care providers.

These resources are designed to support good complaint handling in adult social care settings and include:

We also offer training in effective complaint handling for care providers. You can find out more about this on our website.

Click here to see our Care Provider Resources