Cumbria County Council (03C03660)

Adult care services                      Maladministration causing injustice

13 July 2005

‘Mrs Dale’ (not her real name for legal reasons) complained that the Council’s Social Services Department had made a number of mistakes in assessing her mother’s needs and in meeting those needs. In particular, she claimed that her mother should have been provided with nursing home care instead of residential care when she went into care in February 2001, and that the Council failed to respond appropriately to her representations about this and to complaints she made about the standards of care in the first home her mother entered. Mrs Dale said that she sustained financial detriment as a result, suffered distress and had to take considerable time and trouble in having to keep pursuing these issues with the Council to secure nursing care for her mother.

The Ombudsman found some administrative faults in the way the case had been handled, that record keeping was on the whole poor, that communication with Mrs Dale had not been handled well, that a second medical opinion should have been sought when Mrs Dale asked for this, and that social workers had challenged an assessment of Mrs Dale’s mother which had been done by a nurse assessor in February 2002 when they were not clinically qualified to do so. However, the Ombudsman considered on the evidence available that Mrs Dale’s mother probably did not qualify for nursing care prior to the spring of 2002, by which time she had moved to another care home.

The Ombudsman found maladministration causing injustice and recommended that the Council should:

• pay Mrs Dale £300 for the anxiety its communications failures caused her;
• ensure that its records are completed in a timely way and that their content is accurate; and
• ensure that where medical or nursing input to an assessment is needed, this is obtained and the content respected.
   

Date Published: 13/08/09