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Annual Report of the Ombudsman 2004

Chapter 4 - Relations with Public Bodies within Remit

Relations with Public Bodies within Remit

During the year, I continued to engage with agencies in the health service and to assist them in developing better quality decision making in the delivery of their services to the public. My staff arranged seminars with key staff in the areas managed by the former South Eastern and North Eastern Health Boards. These seminars concentrated on the issues which are important to me in the examination of complaints, e.g. principles of good administration, standards of best practice for public servants and the management of complaints. In addition, my staff also engaged in the same vein with particular groups within the health service e.g. Senior Area Medical Officers and Clinical Risk Managers. The emphasis in all of these interactions is always positive rather than negative i.e. how to improve the quality of the health services delivered.

During the year I met with the County Managers of the Midland Region and subsequently, Westmeath County Council hosted a very successful half day seminar involving staff of my Office and staff of the local authorities of the Midland Region. It has been the policy of the Office in recent years actively to engage with local authorities by way of regional seminars in order to improve relations generally, and to increase their understanding of how to provide a better quality service both to my Office and to the general public.

One of my senior staff met with the Human Resources/Corporate Affairs Sub-Committee of the County and City Managers Association to explore ways of improving standards of administration across all local authorities by communicating best practice examples arising from Ombudsman experience. Having agreed to participate in a liaison group comprising staff from my Office and representatives from local authorities, I look forward to achieving further progress in this area in co-operation with local authorities.

More generally, my Office has been looking at new ways of increasing the level of feedback that it gives to public bodies. I do acknowledge that many public bodies take their accountability responsibilities very seriously and some (albeit a small number) publish in their annual report, details of complaints made to the Ombudsman and the outcome of those complaints. All public bodies carefully monitor references to them in my annual reports, in relation to cases, statistics and otherwise.

In the main, public bodies co-operate with my Office and demonstrate a very high compliance rate with our suggestions and recommendations. But it is important that public bodies seriously evaluate, over time, the outcomes of individual complaints against their organisation and they need to be proactive in looking for underlying trends in all complaints against them and using these trends to effect improvements to their services.

My Office has frequently pointed out that the emphasis in recent years on quality customer service action plans and charters is very welcome and has helped to focus attention on the importance of high quality service delivery. But they do concentrate principally on the achievement of customer service standards and less so on one of the core public service values viz., fairness and equity in how services are delivered. It is this latter area which is of primary concern to my Office and the common thread running through the majority of complaints that we receive.

Arising from complaint outcomes my Office provides guidance to public bodies on standards of best practice, internal complaints systems, the provision of redress and by conducting seminars on good complaint handling. I now see the opportunity to develop this function even further by highlighting issues for the attention of individual public bodies, based on our experience over the years of examining complaints from those bodies. My approach will be to focus on the extent to which the public body is delivering fair, efficient and effective services to its clients.

The benefit of this approach is that it would assist public bodies in the preparation of their statements of strategy, business plans and customer charters. It would also help to embed the concepts of fairness and administrative accountability and enhance their importance vis-à-vis financial accountability. My objective will be to focus not just on a public body’s failings but also on good positive behaviour. Examples of good or poor complaint handling by the body itself might be cited as well as issues such as persistent recurring complaints of the same type and failure by the public body to give reasons or clear explanations for its decisions to its clients. Also of relevance would be patterns of recurring complaints which arise because of legislative defects, absence of legislation, structural or procedural shortcomings or failure to provide adequate resources.

Issues for the attention of a public body will be included in a written report which ideally the Office will present to senior managers and other relevant staff at a seminar hosted by the public body.

I intend to produce no more than one or two such reports each year. My first report will cover the Health Service Executive (HSE). It seems particularly appropriate that the HSE should be the subject of my first report given that it is a new body with new structures but, which is, nevertheless, facing old issues, many of which have come to the attention of my Office over the years.

I intend to present my report to the HSE during 2005 and it will cover the following areas:

• the main issues of concern in the health services from the Ombudsman’s perspective;
• lessons to be learned from cases handled in the past, and
• guidance on principles of best practice in aspects of health service administration.

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