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Managing child safety complaints
The Queensland Ombudsman’s report, Management of child safety complaints – second report: An investigation into the management of child safety complaints within the Department of Child Safety, Youth and Women, was today tabled by the Honourable Curtis Pitt MP, Speaker of the Queensland Parliament.
This report follows an earlier Ombudsman investigation into the then Department of Communities, Child Safety and Disability Services’ (now the Department of Child Safety, Youth and Women) management of child safety complaints. While the 2016 investigation focused on the accuracy of the then department’s complaints data, this investigation focused on how the department manages child safety complaints and its interaction with the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG).
The department’s complaints management system is crucial to ensuring any clients’ concerns with the actions and decisions of the department in administering Queensland’s child protection system can be raised and rectified appropriately. This investigation found that the current complaints management system is not an effective mechanism to rectify poor decision-making or improve business practices.
The investigation identified concerns about the accessibility of the department’s complaints management system. The department’s attempts to locally resolve clients’ concerns, before classifying them as a complaint, often resulted in a drawn-out cycle of interactions with agency officers without effective resolution.
Further, the department miscategorised many complaints as ‘case issues’ rather than complaints. This often resulted in a frustrating cycle of interactions for the department’s clients before their concerns were responded to as a complaint.
“As a result of the failures in its complaints handling, the department is almost certainly under-reporting its child safety complaints and is potentially wasting resources through duplication of effort,” said Queensland Ombudsman Phil Clarke.
Even when a client’s concerns were handled as a complaint, the department’s complaints handling process was unnecessarily complex and confusing. This resulted in frustration, delay, and a lack of clarity about the outcome of the complaint.
Decision-making in the management of complaints was a key concern identified in the investigation. A lack of clarity about how a decision should be made and who should be the decision-maker has resulted in poor outcomes for complainants.
The department has also failed to maintain a meaningful reporting framework to identify systemic issues in complaints management and child safety administrative decisions generally. This undermines a key benefit of effective complaints management, to identify improvements to current practices and uncover problematic patterns in administrative decisions.
The OPG refers child safety related complaints received by its Community Visitors to the department. The 2016 investigation identified a need for better coordination between the OPG and the department. While both agencies have taken steps towards better coordination, further steps are required.
The availability of accessible, fair and efficient complaints handling is critical to the proper operation of the child safety system in Queensland. The department’s current complaints management system is not meeting that need. This report makes recommendations aimed at assisting the department to implement best practice across all facets of complaints management.
Source: Office of the Queensland Ombudsman, Australia
