National Care Service - complaints co-design: findings summary

Co-design sessions

Since the summer of 2023, we have been running co-design events across different communities in Scotland. At these events, we have been working with people to discuss how we can create a fair, effective and consistent approach to complaints and redress.

Across all of the sessions, there was a mixture of people with lived experience of care support and people who work in care services taking part.

The events were held in urban and rural areas. We also held online events for people who could not attend in person. Around 200 people participated in the co-design events for NCS complaints.

The focus of these sessions was to:

• test what we learned from our research
• understand people’s views and experience of the current complaints system
• understand what needs to change and what should be a priority for an NCS complaints service

We sent a summary of key findings from our research to participants in advance of the sessions. You can read this in Annex A.

From these events, we were able to gather a lot of feedback, ideas and priorities on how to improve people’s experience of making a complaint or giving feedback about NCS services. We have also gathered people’s ideas for improvements that can be made to existing complaints processes now.

Our co-design sessions will continue. The rest of this report sets out what we heard from people during our co-design between May and September 2023^[5].