How we deal with complaints
Complaints about Adult Social Care have two stages:
Informal stage
If you have a complaint, you can tell someone you know from the service and they will try to resolve the problem promptly. If they cannot resolve the problem, they will offer to pass your details to the corporate complaints team to be dealt with under the social care complaints procedure.
If you don’t feel your complaint can be resolved locally, or if local resolution has failed, you can contact the Manchester Feedback and Complaints Service directly.
Complaints should be raised as soon as possible after the event and in most cases within 12 months of the issue arising. The Council does have some discretion to extend this time limit if, there are reasonable grounds for you not to have submitted your complaint earlier. If a decision is taken not to investigate your complaint due to this time limit, we will notify you of this in writing, detailing the reasons for our decision.
Stage 1
If your complaint relates to social care services you should expect to receive a response within 20 working days. If your complaint is complex or covers a number of areas, we may take longer to respond, however, we will tell you if we think this is likely to be the case.
When we receive your complaint we will allocate it to an 'investigating officer' from the service your complaint relates. We will write to tell you we have received your complaint, outline the areas of your complaint we will investigate and when you can expect to receive a response.
The investigating officer will gather and review the evidence (what you have said, what staff and others said, what’s recorded in our systems, both electronic and paper, along with relevant legislation or guidance) to get the clearest picture possible of what happened.
Once the complaint has been looked into we will write to explain the outcome of the investigation and what we intend to do to resolve the problem.
If you are not satisfied with the response you can contact the Manchester Feedback and Complaints Service who will look at the response and your comments and decide if the service needs to do more to put things right. If this is the case we will contact you to tell you what else we intend to do to resolve your complaint. If we believe the service has done all they reasonably can do we will write to advise you of this.
If you'd like to take things further
If you are not satisfied with our response to your complaint, you have the right to contact the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO) to discuss your concerns. We will provide contact details for the LGO with the final response to your complaint.
Adults, Health and Wellbeing complaints – not social care
If your complaint does not relate to social care services provided by us, but is about other services we’ve provided, for example financial services, homelessness services, or other aspects of the support and advice we’ve given, we follow the complaints procedure.
Annual reports
Read about how we've performed in our annual report.