Summary: there is no evidence the Council failed to consider and respond properly to Ms A’s complaints about the operation of her father’s alarm system.

The complaint

1. Ms A complains that the Council-commissioned falls detector provided for her father (Mr X) did not always work, the engineers failed to attend promptly when it failed and the company has reduced the sensitivity of the system.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

2. We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’. In this statement, I have used the word ‘fault’ to refer to these. If we are satisfied with a council’s actions or proposed actions, we can complete our investigation and issue a decision statement. (Local Government Act 1974, section 30(1B) and 34H(i), as amended)

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How I considered this complaint

3. I considered all the information provided by Ms A and by the Council. Both Ms A and the Council had an opportunity to comment on a draft of this statement and I considered their comments before I reached a final decision.

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What I found

The contract

4. The Council holds a contract with a company to supply telecare equipment. The contract says ‘Telecare services are expected to operate within reablement principles and safeguarding policy, ensuring timely installation and that equipment installed in Clients’ homes is operating in the way it was prescribed, providing the high quality monitoring service that prescribers believe is operating, and communicating back when this is not the case.’
5. The contract also says, ‘The Provider will have arrangements in place to provide an emergency maintenance service for equipment failure or breakdown as requested either by the Client, their representative or a Prescriber to be available at all times.’
6. The contract also says “Ensure that faulty or non-working equipment in the homes of Clients are replaced within 48 hours from the stock held. Any disruption to the Service for the Client shall be minimised and in no case of failure result in a loss of full Service for more than 24 hours.”

What happened

7. Mr X lives on his own. Ms A, his daughter, lives about 30 minutes away. In 2017 the Council recommended after an assessment of his needs that he would benefit from a falls detector pendant. The Council says “This equipment is designed to detect ‘hard’ falls and raise an automatic alert as well as enabling the user to manually call for help by pressing a button……The fall detection technology does not allow analysis and interpretation of all fall situations. Soft falls, slumping falls, descent-controlled falls against a wall or a chair are not detected.” The manufacturer’s information says it cannot guarantee detection of all falls, which is why the presence of a hand-operated alarm is important.
8. The Council says when a fall is detected or if the user presses the button on the device, an alert is raised which is picked up by the Welbeing call centre. Staff will then respond and speak to the user via the alarm unit and if necessary, summon help by contacting the nominated keyholder or the emergency services. If the user does not respond when contacted, the call centre staff will summon help. Welbeing maintains a log of these incidents.
9. On 24 October 2020 Ms A complained to the Council that the falls detector had failed three times during the year. She said after the first fall in February 2020 Mr X’s carers contacted Wellbeing to ensure it would alert the call centre to any future falls. She said her father had fallen again on 23 October and again the falls detector had failed to alert the calls centre. She said Wellbeing was unable to guarantee an engineer would attend to resolve the fault that day. She said in February it had taken several days for the equipment to be fixed. She also complained the wellbeing operator had told her the detector only alerted the call centre if the service user fell and did not then move.
10. The Council acknowledged her complaint and said it would reply within 28 days. Ms A wrote again to ask for a response on 27 November and to report additional contact problems with Wellbeing. On 1 December the Council apologized for the delay and said the project manager was responding to her that day.
11. The project manager emailed Ms A on an email dated 20 November. He said while the detector would alert the call centre to a ‘hard and fast’ fall, it did not register a slow fall such as someone sliding down a wall. He said because of this the falls detector was not guaranteed to detect every fall. He said in the past there had been complaints that the detector was too sensitive and triggered false callouts which caused distress.
12. The project manager said he had asked for a log of all calls ‘since October 2020’ and noted that there were four occasions when the detector had recorded a fall, and 58 occasions when it detected the manual button had been pressed. He said for that reason he was confident the equipment worked. He said the activity log showed that although the call centre operator did not guarantee an engineer would visit that day, in fact he had done so, and replaced the equipment.
13. Ms A complained again. She said her father’s February fall had been ‘hard and fast’ but had not been detected. She said her father’s care team manager shared her concerns about the lack of sensitivity of the detector. She disputed that her father had manually pressed the call button 58 times during October 2020.
14. A social care team manager responded to Ms A’s further complaint on 11 December. She said neither the Council nor the telecare provider had made changes to the sensitivity of the equipment. She said she had reviewed the disputed call logs and found that most times Mr X had pressed the alarm button was to inform the operator he was going out and had returned home. She concluded by saying there was no falls detector available which was 100% guaranteed but offered a review of Mr X’s needs to see if any additional equipment could be provided to assist him.
15. Ms A complained to the Ombudsman.
16. The Council has provided a copy of the log which shows the falls detector button was pressed manually multiple times during 2020 (although only 9 times during October 2020). The log concludes at the end of October 2020.
17. The Council says it should have asked Ms A for the record of the three dates when she said the falls detector failed but omitted to do so: it says instead it has looked at the three dates when the Wellbeing records show they were notified of Mr X having fallen without the fall detector activating. On none of those occasions was the detector found to be faulty, although the engineer replaced the equipment on the third occasion in any event “with an alternative ‘older’ model on the basis that this would better meet (Mr X’s) requirements and which has a less sensitive mechanism for cancelling an alert.”
18. The Council also says, “The equipment logs also show that on three separate occasions to those above, the fall detector triggered an alert. These occurred on 19 May 2020, 20 May 2020 and 7 June 2020. On the first occasion, Welbeing tried to contact (Mr X) three times with no success and therefore called the ‘keyholder’ to assist (Mr X). The subsequent two alerts were found to be false alarms.”
19. Ms A says the purpose of her complaint was to draw attention to a product that is faulty before someone suffers as a result of its failure. She says it is reasonable to believe that a falls detector detects all falls.

Analysis

20. The Council cannot guarantee the falls detector is 100% reliable and will work every time. It has explained to Ms A there are circumstances in which the detector will not alert the call centre.
21. The falls detector worn by Mr X was tested several times and found to be working although on the last occasion it was replaced by a model which was less sensitive to being cancelled by the user. So the sensitivity of the model was changed but not in the way Ms A believed. That was a reasonable response to the concerns raised by Ms A although it was not to her satisfaction.
22. The Council offered a review of Mr X’s needs to see if anything else could be put in place but Ms A was clear that was not the aim of her complaint.
23. The Council’s response of 20 November implied Mr X had pressed the alarm 58 times during October alone, which was an unhelpfully incorrect response. It was also unhelpful of the Council to insist there had been no changes to the sensitivity of the model without a proper explanation of the replacement model. That in itself did not cause any injustice either to Ms A or to Mr X however.

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Final decision

24. I have completed this investigation as there was no fault in the way the Council responded in practice to complaints about the operation of the system.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman