INSIDE QUALITY: EDITION FOUR
When we ask to see how a complaint was handled, most providers hand us the same thing: the date it closed.
But a closed complaint and a learned lesson are not the same outcome, and we consistently find the first is well documented while the second is assumed rather than evidenced. The strengthened Standards do not just ask whether complaints are resolved. They ask whether the organisation can show what it learned, what changed, and whether it told anyone.
Read other editions of our Inside Quality series:
Edition 1: Good Governance isn’t about meeting minutes. It’s about decisions.
Edition 2: What we look for first: The Standards Transition.
Edition 3: What we look for first: Skilled & sufficient workforce.
Edition 4: What we look for first: Complaints & Feedback
What we look for before we read the complaints register
Does closing a complaint end the process, or start a second one?
The strongest services treat resolution as the halfway point. The complaint gets fixed for the person who raised it, and then a separate question gets asked: does this tell us anything about the wider organisation?
Is open disclosure something that happens, or something that is described as happening?
We listen for whether that conversation is specific about what happened, why, and what is being done, or general, an apology without an explanation.
Would a family who complained six months ago recognise the practice today as different?
If nothing observably changed, the complaint achieved an outcome for the file but not for the next resident in a similar situation.
Three things we ask to see
A complaint, followed all the way to a trend report.
We pick one closed complaint and ask to be shown where it appears beyond its own file. A complaint that disappears into its own folder once closed cannot contribute to anything beyond itself.
What was reported to the governing body, and what was actually said.
A summary that lists numbers without analysis tells the governing body that complaints exist. It does not tell them what the complaints are revealing.
Evidence that staff heard about it.
If a complaint led to a genuine change in practice, the people delivering that practice should know why. Open disclosure that stays at the leadership level has not reached the people whose practice it is meant to change.
The conversation that tells us the most
We ask staff: “Tell me about a complaint that changed how something is done here.”
Strong answers are concrete. A specific complaint, a specific change. Staff can describe the before and the after. Weaker answers default to “we always take feedback on board” without being able to point to a single instance.
The pattern we see most often
Complaints are one of the few sources of insight an organisation gets for free, raised by the people the service exists for. Treating them as a queue to clear, rather than a signal to read, wastes the most direct feedback a provider will ever receive.
We have sat with providers who had years of complaints data and had never once mapped it. The patterns were obvious once someone looked. Two recurring themes, same wing, different staff, different months. Neither had ever made it to a board report. Once they did, both were resolved within a quarter.
If the last complaint your service received were raised again tomorrow by someone else, would anything about how your team responds actually be different?
Mathew Brincat
Chief Clinical Officer
Inside Quality is a regular series from Provider Assist exploring governance, leadership and clinical quality through practical observations from across aged care. Our aim is not to explain compliance. It is to encourage a different way of thinking about quality.
