National Care Service - complaints co-design: findings summary

Numbers and types of care complaints

Complaints received by the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman

The Scottish Public Services Ombudsman publishes detailed statistics about the complaints they receive each year, including the sector, subject, outcome and geographic area. According to published complaints data for 2022-23, they received a total of 3,527 complaints. Of these:

• 34% were about the health sector
• 30% were about local authorities
• 4% were about joint health and social care

In 2022-23, the most common types of health care complaints received were about:

• clinical treatment or diagnosis: 761 complaints
• communication, staff attitude, dignity or confidentiality: 144 complaints
• appointments or admissions (delays, cancellations or waiting lists): 78 complaints

In 2022-23, the most common types of health and social care partnership social work complaints were about:

• child services or family support: 18 complaints
• communication: 13 complaints
• community mental health services: 10 complaints

Complaints received by the Care Inspectorate

There are over 11,000 registered social care services operating in Scotland. According to the Care Inspectorate’s published complaints data for 2022-23, the most common types of services they received complaints about were:

• care homes: 2,814 complaints
• day care of children: 1,084 complaints
• combined housing support and care at home: 985 complaints

The most common social care complaints the Care Inspectorate upheld were about:

• inadequate healthcare: 635 complaints
• communication between staff and service users or relatives: 299 complaints
• wellbeing (behavioural, developmental, emotional or social): 261 complaints

Care homes make up only around 12% of the registered services. However, almost half of the total number of complaints the Care Inspectorate received were about care homes.

Complaints received by the Scottish Social Services Council

The Scottish Social Services Council publishes data on ‘fitness to practice’ concerns in their annual report. In 2022-23, they:

• received 3,602 fitness to practise concerns
• closed or resolved 4,023 concerns (reducing the amount of open cases)
• received 6 whistleblowing referrals (concerns raised by the workforce). In four of these, they opened a fitness to practice case

Review of published adult social care complaints data

As part of our research, we carried out a review of adult social care complaints data published by:

• the 32 local authorities in Scotland
• integration joint boards
• health and social care partnerships

We searched the websites of all local authorities, integration joint boards and health and social care partnerships for data relating to: 2020-21 and 2021-22. Our review did not extend beyond adult social care and we did not request any unpublished complaints data. We also did not include data on ‘fitness to practice’ concerns about individual workers.

We found that:

• complaints data was hard to find on health and social care partnership and local authority websites. Often the reports were called different things
• sometimes complaints data was published in an annual report or included with minutes of a meeting
• for some local authorities, we did not find any relevant complaints data on their website, or on the relevant integration joint board or health and social care partnership website^[4]
• when there was complaints data, it was usually high level such as the total number of complaints received
• there were several good examples of reporting, where there was clear presentation and analysis of the complaints data

In our review, we found there were a number of differences in how adult social care complaints data was categorised and reported locally. Due to these differences, it was not possible to determine the total number of complaints across Scotland or identify trends through the published data. We have found there are opportunities to improve the transparency and consistency of the reporting of adult social care complaints data at a local level. This could support data analysis at a national level and help to inform improvement action. We will use the findings of our review to explore improvements in how complaints data is collected and reported for the NCS.