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

Co-design sessions

This co-design looked at what could be done to make it simpler for people accessing care support to submit complaints and for service providers to receive them. It has helped give us a better understanding of the experience that people have in the current complaints system. It has also helped us understand the kind of improvements that would make it better for everyone.

In summer 2024, we spoke to 55 complaint handlers representing 31 of the 32 local authorities in Scotland. These are people with experience of receiving and handling complaints as part of their work.

We also spoke to 10 members of the People Led Policy Panel. These are people with experience of accessing social care. We also spoke to a member of our Lived Experience Expert Panel, and their carer, who have experience of accessing care.

During autumn and winter 2024, we ran 23 co-design sessions. Some were in person and some were online with different groups. This let us learn about people’s experience of submitting a complaint and then work through ideas for making improvements.

We worked with 3 groups, sharing the information and outputs among them to check how their ideas might work in practice:

1. Co-Design Group A – people with lived experience of submitting a complaint

2. Co-Design Group B - people with lived experience of supporting someone to submit a complaint or receiving and handling complaints.

To establish ways of working and a safe space for participants, these two groups initially met separately. They joined to form one group of 14 people from session 3 onwards meeting in total 9 times. They used their personal knowledge to:

• help us better understand the good practice and key barriers faced when submitting a complaint
• generate ideas to overcome barriers
• make recommendations on making it easier to submit a complaint

3. Co-Design Group C – 22 complaint handlers and people who manage complaints services. They met 7 times. These included local authorities, Health and Social Care Partnerships and complaint bodies. They used their expert knowledge to:

• help us better understand why complaints systems are different across the country
• make recommendations to improve submitting and receiving complaints

Across the 3 groups, the following 6 themes were covered:

• anonymous complaints
• complaints about multiple services
• accessible complaint submission routes
• what is included in a complaint submission
• communication when submitting and receiving a complaint
• safeguarding vulnerable adults / sensitive situations

For our second round of engagement, we worked with specialist and seldom heard voices groups. This included 53 people with experience of:

• disability, including Alzheimer’s Disease,
• those from ethnic minority backgrounds including older people and Gypsy/Traveller communities

They helped us to understand a wide range of people’s experiences of submitting complaints.

We will publish reports from our seldom heard voices groups later in 2025.