Adult Mental Health Service complaints

​Request 847970802 ​

How many complaints have been made about adult mental health in last 6 years and how many times have the adult mental health investigators closed complaints unfairly without investigating or showing associated records.

And how many times has a complaint been raised to level 3 regarding adult mental health.

Response

A total of 166 complaints have been recorded for Adult Mental Health services since 1 January 2020.

734 compliments have been recorded for these services over the same period.

Identifying the extent to which complaints were investigated and associated records reviewed would require a manual case-by-case review of individual complaint submissions, and determining whether any were closed without sufficient investigation would necessitate a judgement on fairness and adequacy in each case. 

The question of ‘how many times have the adult mental health investigators closed complaints unfairly without investigating or showing associated records’ is, therefore, outside of the remit of the Freedom of Information mechanism, which is designed to enable access to information held in recorded form by a Scheduled Public Authority, rather than to pose questions requiring comment or opinion. Records are not held to satisfy this part of the request. Therefore, Article 3 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 applies.

As standard practice, if a complainant is dissatisfied with the outcome or closure of their complaint, following internal escalation through the complaint process the Department would then escalate the matter to the Complaints Board. This ensures an independent and external review process is available where concerns about fairness or decision-making arise.

It is not possible to report upon the number of incidents escalated to Stage 3 of the complaints procedure prior to September 2022 when a systems upgrade was implemented. Of 93 complaints logged for Adult Mental Health services since September 2022, 4 have been escalated to Stage 3.

Article applied

Article 3 Meaning of “information held by a public authority”

​​For the purposes of this Law, information is held by a public authority if –

(a) it is held by the authority, otherwise than on behalf of another person; or

(b) it is held by another person on behalf of the authority.