Department of Health

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Early adopters

The information on this page is no longer being updated, but is retained for archive purposes.

In the White Paper Our health, our care, our say, the Government made a commitment to implement a single comprehensive complaints process across health and social care by 2009, focussed on resolving complaints locally with a more personal and comprehensive approach to handling complaints.

In order to support both the development of the new approach and the practice and behaviours needed to deliver it successfully, new arrangements are being introduced through a programme of  Early Adopters. These early adopter sites represent a wide variety of local environments, approaches to complaints handling and levels of performance.

The early adopter sites will still be operating within the current complaints legislative framework but, supported by the Making Experiences Count team at the Department of Health and each other, will develop their approaches to local resolution. The goal of the Early Adopter Programme is to identify the success factors, behaviours and tools in resolving the vast majority of complaints at a local level.  

Sharing your ideas and good practice

The attached questionnaire has been devised for early adopter sites to provide examples of innovative thinking, interesting cases and good practice on complaints handling from their sites. A template has been produced to help early adopter organisations to submit examples of these processes adopted by their organisation and which can be shared collectively with other early adopter sites requiring further understanding of the standards for the development of new practices. Once these examples have been approved by the Early Adopter Editorial Board they will be placed on the shared site so that all non-early adopter sites have new oppurtunities to learn from processes adopted by colleagues already working towards the new approach to health and adult social care complaints handling.

Toolkit

A toolkit is being developed to provide links to information and tools which Early Adopter bodies may find helpful in piloting the new approach to complaints. It should be stressed that these are examples of materials which other organisations have found helpful and are not a prescribed part of the Early Adopter Programme.

Workshops

The Central team are hosting a number of workshops to look into more detail certain areas which require further consideration. The purpose of these workshops are to assist us and all stakeholder organisations to further evaluate the future impact of moving NHS complaints to a two stage framework to include adult social care, and to draw on the experiences of what works well and what does not.  The overall outcome expected from all of these workshops is to help Early Adopter organisations to develop innovative ways of working, building on the good practice that already exists in some areas and trial them.  The workshops bring together the experiences of EA organisations and their skills and helps us to understand how best a new single health and social care complaints process fits into the wider agenda by testing these topical areas with leading individuals and organisations within the thematic fields. The following attachments are all write-ups of these workshops.

Regional conferences

Presentations and reports from the regional conferences, July 2008.

Early adopters

A full list of early adopter site participants

Access keys