RNHA chief executive takes the positive from care home complaint case studies

Frank Ursell, the chief executive officer of the Registered Nursing Home Association (RNHA), has welcomed this week’s report from the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO), which found that complaints about care homes and home care have risen by 22 per cent.

Although highlighting issues with care services that include the attitudes of care staff and the way in which dementia care is handled, Mr Ursell believes that case study examples show how complaints are being used to drive up standards, commenting:

“Whilst we would have welcomed more detail from the LGO on the types of complaints received about care homes, we believe the report shows that many problems can be resolved to the satisfaction of the complainant and that care homes want to provide the best possible service to their residents.

“With some 18,000 care homes in England delivering services 24-hours a day to over 400,000 people, plus nearly 6,000 domiciliary care agencies, the scale of provision is such that there are bound to be areas of dissatisfaction. We are talking about human beings, not machines, providing care to other human beings. What matters is that care homes take complaints seriously and strive to resolve them to the best of their ability.”

Mr Ursell continues: “The fact that during a whole year the LGO dealt with only 1,000 complaints, across both domiciliary and residential care services, suggests that the vast majority of problems that crop up are dealt with by care providers themselves without the need for complainants to feel they need to contact the LGO.

“We also know from research published earlier this year by the Personal Social Services Research Unit at the University of Kent that the care home residents who took part in a specially commissioned study expressed generally high levels of satisfaction with the quality of the service they were receiving which, in most instances, exceeded the expectations they had before moving in.”