Council pay out to elderly resident after delay in tackling poor standard of care

Peterborough City Council (PCC) failed to respond quickly enough to complaints about the poor standard of care an elderly woman received in her home, independent regulators say.

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO) found that the council was slow to resolve the issue with the care provider it had commissioned, resulting in a pay-out of compensation.

The LGSCO's judgment says that: "The Council was at fault because the Care Provider did not meet some of [the woman's] needs and did not follow its complaints process."

It added that her son, who made the complaint, "suffered distress" and that the council agreed to apologise to him and pay him £200.

The care provider, Hales Care Peterborough, accepts that there were two instances in which the woman's medication was late as well as problems with how frequently her flannels were changed and problems with food labelling.

The LGSCO also says that her "toileting needs were not properly met" for a period of nine months and that the faults identified with her care "potentially put [her] health at risk".

The complaint and its outcome was included in a council report on the complaints related to adult social care it received over the last year.

The report states that 42 complaints were logged in total – although this doesn’t include complaints made directly to care providers rather than to PCC.

Of the complaints in the council’s logs, more than a third (38%) were about external providers, with the next largest percentage (21%) about PCC’s long-term team: a group of social workers who assess and review the ongoing and future needs of vulnerable adults.

When broken down by category, the most common kind of complaint by far involved delayed or failed services (67%).

Issues included delays in communication from social workers and delays in arranging respite care (temporary care arrangements allowing full-time carers to take a break).

PCC adults and safeguarding service director Debbie McQuade said that issues such as these usually stem from managing "high caseloads" rather than staff shortages.

The council “doesn’t have a particular issue around vacancies for our social workers”, she said, but demand does "fluctuate" throughout the year.

“In many cases the delays can be avoided and that’s part of our learning process,” Ms McQuade continued. “We will address original complaints directly with workers if that’s what we need to do, which we’ve done.”

The next largest category of complaints concerned the attitude or conduct of staff, although this only actually equated to five complaints in total.

These included care users being unhappy with “insensitive comments”, “attitude whilst on [a] home visit” and an “accusation that the care worker was argumentative with service users' partner whilst in their home”.

Apologies were also issued for a carer not wearing appropriate uniform, failure to adequately consider parents’ views on their child’s care and for a “mistake with [a] sling” in which cold water was used for personal care.

In 2021/22, there was a “significant increase” in complaints being partially or fully upheld: 70 per cent compared with 57 per cent the year before.

The council report says this is “inevitable” as the number of complaints themselves decline.

It also says that it will increase the target for responding to complaints from 20 to 28 working days after more than a third received a late response last year.

This is due to “complex” complaints and the need to involve “joint responses from external partners”, it says.

A PCC spokesperson repeated the council's apology regarding the complaint escalated to the LGSCO.

"We fully accept the findings of the ombudsman’s report and are sorry for the distress this caused," they said.

"We would like to reassure our communities that we continually monitor all our providers and ensure that our and their staff are following good practice to meet the needs of those we support.”