National Care Service - complaints and redress: research and co-design report - easy read

Part 1

About the National Care Service

The Scottish Government is working to improve social care, community health and social work.

We are working with people and organisations across Scotland.

We want everyone to have access to fair and high-quality social care support.

This is why we are designing a National Care Service (NCS).

The NCS will be delivered in a way to fulfil people’s human rights.

It will support them to live full and independent lives.

Co-design with people who have experience of receiving and providing social care support has been valuable to this work.

Co-design means letting people share their ideas and tell us how to make things better.

Co-design is important because it helps us keep people at the centre of the NCS.

We want the NCS to improve the social care support experience for everyone in Scotland.

People have told us that the system needs to change.

Introduction

This report shares what we found out from desk research and co-design work about complaints and redress in social care and community health.

Redress means to fix something that has gone wrong.

In July 2024, we shared findings from our first research and co-design work.

Co-design lets people share their ideas and tell us how to make things better.

You can read more about this here.

We have continued to talk to people in social care and community health about complaints and redress.

People tell us what is working well and what needs to be better.

This report tells you:

• what we talked to people about



• what people told us



• what we found out from reading and research



• how we can make complaints and redress better

An Independent Review of Adult Social Care

The Independent Review of Adult Social Care in 2021 said:

• complaints should be handled better
• people should get support when their care goes wrong

This is also known as the Feeley review. You can read more about it here.

The National Care Service Bill

In June 2022, the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill was introduced.

A bill is a proposed law that the Parliament needs to pass before it can become a law.

The Bill included rules to set up a new way for people to make a complaint about care support. It also included new rules that could change how complaints are handled.

On 25 February 2025, there was a discussion about Stage 2 of the Bill. During this discussion the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee agreed to remove Part 1 of the Bill. This included removing proposed rules on complaints.

A committee is a group of people who speak to many other people and services to make suggestions to the Scottish Parliament about Bills.

This new Bill has passed stage 3 and is now called the Care Reform (Scotland) Bill. You can read more about it here.

What we learned from desk research

Our previous research found that making a complaint can be hard and confusing.

This research looked at ways to make it easier to make a complaint and help people who handle complaints.

We looked at research and spoke to 371 people.

This helped us see what needs to change to make this system better for everyone and follow the suggestions from the Feeley review.

We did research to learn:

• how people make complaints about their social care and community health
• how complaints are received by councils

A council is a group of people who are elected to work to provide services in a local area.

• the rules around how they deal with complaints



• how things could be improved

To learn more, we researched:

• how complaints about social care and community health are handled across Scotland



• what is the same and what is different in local areas across Scotland



• the steps to make a complaint and how it is handled



• ways to make a complaint easier

We learned that social care and community health complaints:

• can involve many different types of complaints and users



• can involve many services which can make it complicated and confusing to make a complaint



• need to follow legal rules and processes when a service receives a complaint



• we also heard that it is not always easy for people to understand how to make a complaint

Co-design sessions

We held co-design sessions.

Co-design lets people share their ideas and tell us how to make things better.

In these sessions, we spoke to:

• 55 complaint handlers from most local authorities in Scotland



• 10 people from the People Led Policy Panel



• a member of our Lived Experience Expert Panel and their carer, who know what it is like to use care services

We worked with 3 groups and shared ideas to see what would work in real life.

The 3 groups were:

• Group A had people who have experience of making or helping people to make a complaints



• Group B had people who receive and deal with complaints

To make sure everyone felt comfortable, Groups A and B met separately first. Then they met together as one group of 14 people.

Groups A and B met 9 times and shared their experiences to help make the complaints process better.

• Group C had complaint handlers and managers

Group C had 22 people from councils, care partnerships, and complaints services. They met 7 times.