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Adult care services Maladministration causing injustice
7 May 2008
Ealing Council delayed in acting on a disabled woman’s application for an increase in direct payments. The Ombudsman says the significant improvements in the woman’s care package could have been achieved within six months of the initial request. He welcomes the Council’s ready agreement to pay £16,700 compensation to remedy the injustice. It has also addressed procedure and training issues arising from the case. ‘Mrs Benjamin’ (not her real name for legal reasons) suffers from motor neurone disease. She needs 24-hour care and support and is without articulate speech. She expresses her views with the aid of a ‘litewriter’. She complained that the Council had failed to deal properly with her application for an increase in her direct payments. She applied in March 2005. The Council took until May 2006 to introduce increased payments based on a tailored package of care. It did not communicate properly with her in the meantime nor did it acknowledge that she could, if she wished, receive all of her care via direct payments. It did not act on her request to pursue her internal complaint to stage 2 of its procedure. The failure to deal properly with Mrs Benjamin’s application denied her access to additional funding that would have made a significant difference to her quality of life. She and members of her family suffered distress and anxiety as a result. The Ombudsman finds maladministration and says that the Council has now remedied the injustice by paying Mrs Benjamin £16,700 representing the value of the payments she missed as a result of the Council’s failures. The Council has revised its procedures for dealing with direct payments and introduced mandatory training on direct payments for all social workers. The Ombudsman also asks the Council to report back to him in three months time with summary information to illustrate its current performance in dealing with applications for direct payments.
Date Published: 14/10/08
are in .pdf format. To view these files you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader software. It can be downloaded below free of charge. Click To Download