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>> The Office of the Ombudsman, we've been around for about 30 years,
29 years at the moment, and over those 29 years we have dealt with about
80,000 complaints and several hundreds of thousands of inquiries.
But as Siobhan just said we've actually received very, very few complaints with
relation to the Disability Act, so I'll talk you through that over the next few minutes.
Initially when we were established we had responsibility for government
departments, An Post, Telecom Eireann at the time, then a year later we got local
authorities and health boards, which is now the HSE, then in 2005 we were
given responsibility for part 3 of the Disability Act.
So under part 3 people have a right to access, physical access to buildings,
they have a right to information on services they receive.
They have a right to make a complaint about sectoral plans that are produced
via various government departments, etcetera.
So in 2005 we got that responsibility.
And we did expect, I have to say, quite a few complaints to emerge, but actually
since then, on average, we've only received about six or seven complaints a
year about the Disability Act!
And that is despite there having been a fair amount of publicity, the NDA
themselves did quite a lot of publicity about this and we have done some,
although I have to say we fully accept that we could do a lot more public
awareness work, we're just a little bit challenged in terms of the resources that we have.
But people with disabilities can complain to us via normal channels under the
Ombudsman Act.
In 2007 our jurisdiction was extended to include a lot of public voluntary
hospitals, but also the hundreds of services that might be providing services
on behalf of the HSE or with financial assistance from the HSE.
So there are several hundred of those and they would be within jurisdiction of our office.
And then just last year we got a new, another 180 bodies under our
jurisdiction, that would include the whole third level education sector, so people
for the first time can make complaints about universities, about VECs, other
bodies that came in under jurisdiction at that time would be the National Council
for Special Education, the Housing Authority, the Disabled Driver's Medical
Appeals Board, so a number of agencies, in fact doubling the number of
bodies we had within remit.
All citizens in this country, you all know, have rights bestowed on them by our
constitution and then various pieces of primary and secondary legislation.
But what is difficult is that if people aren't aware of their rights they can't
exercise those rights.
So on a number of occasions our office would speak to public bodies and remind
them of the necessity to inform people about their rights.
Our experience is that when people know about their rights they use them,
if they don't know about them they actually don't.
Rights are constantly changing.
There is new legislation and amendments being introduced all the
time, so that puts a lot of public bodies under pressure, and I think a number of
people in this audience today have a huge interest in this, and I'll talk in a
minute about access officers and the role that they have to play in informing
people about their rights.
There may be some access officers in the audience, hopefully not, but there
may be some who already had a full-time job, were very, very busy just
doing what they were doing, and then they were told very suddenly one day,
we need you to be the access officer as well!
And that wouldn't be a welcome piece of information to hear from your boss,
if you already have a very, very busy job.
But the access officer role is absolutely and utterly central, we think,
to the provision of proper and good services, accessible services, to people with disabilities.
The heads of every public body and there is about 650 bodies who fall --
who have obligations under the Disability Act, the head of every public
body has a responsibility to provide or arrange for, and coordinate the provision
of assistance and guidance to persons with disabilities in accessing its services.
People must be told about the services of access officers and how they may
access these services.
If disabled people are unaware about access officers, access to particular
services may seem blocked to them.
Assistance with accessing services is a legal right, and access officers are
appointed for this purpose.
Of the few complaints that we get to our office every year, many of them are due
to the fact that the person or a person perhaps advocating on their behalf,
wasn't aware that there was an access officer, they were having a problem with
the public body, be it a local authority or a hospital, whatever, and they had
difficulty getting the frontline service person they were dealing with to
understand their complaint or to deal with them.
They made contact with our office and we were able to say well hang on,
were you not put in touch with an access officer?
We might contact the public body and in a number of instances an
access officer was suddenly manufactured, was actually created in
response to our inquiry.
We would say to public bodies, there is no point in you having an access officer
unless that access officer has a job description, has time to perform their
duties, has an interest in performing their duties, and will go about doing the
job very proactively.
So not just waiting until somebody looks for your service, but actually going out
there and saying, scanning the environment around you, predicting
what might cause accessibility issues, and working with the management to
ensure that you proactively address those issues.
It's very important that all staff in an organisation know who the access
officer is, often somebody might ring a reception, ring a switch and ask to be
put through to the access officer and the person doesn't know.
So it's really, really important that all staff of an organisation are aware of
who the access officer is and what their role is.
There should be very good signposting to the access officer, and not just relying
on a website, as you all know, not everybody uses the internet.
So a variety of ways of signposting users of the service towards that access officer.
I apologise, I was listening to the talk there on universal design, feeling
extremely guilty about my slides, so apologies for people who can't read
these, mea culpa, but I'll talk through a little bit of them anyway.
Disability awareness training is absolutely critical in every organisation.
Some of us might think we have a fairly good understanding of what it means to
have a disability, but I think most people have something to learn about various
disabilities and implications of disability out there.
Every organisation should run disability awareness training quite regularly.
And staff should feel obliged to attend that, because there can be
always something new that they will learn.
Some of the classics that people come to us and complain about is somebody
with a visual impairment has somebody coming up and talking to them, without
introducing themselves, their name or what their position is, be it that they be a
housing officer or they are a doctor or nurse, etcetera.
People who have hearing impairments, people having conversations in front of
them looking very serious, looking very worrying, without things being explained
to them what the conversations are happening.
People investing in putting wonderful braille signs on doors, but if the person
with the visual impairment doesn't know where the door is in the first place it's
not exactly helpful.
Regularly people using, trying to access our services would find it difficult where
we have asked perhaps for a complaint to be written down, now obviously we do
provide services and we do assist people to write things down,
but understanding maybe some people with dyslexia, for example, might not like
filling in forms or if they do, they mightn't like to put too much detail
down, they will keep it short and maybe part of the message gets missed.
So we would very much encourage all access officers and all public bodies to
ensure that there is regular disability awareness training for staff and I know
I'm not the only person to have said that today.
Again what's on this slide really is information that's on the accessibility.ie website.
So we would encourage access officers to use that information that is available,
that the NDA has published.
Complaints and appeals.
Most public bodies do not particularly like when complaints are made, I would
say that about ourselves and our own organisation, we get complaints about what we do.
It's never particularly pleasant, most people in this day and age now are
working hard, they are very, very busy, a complaint may come in, they may say
gosh to examine this properly I need to give this a lot of time and people often
don't have a lot of time.
But we would encourage all public bodies to look at complaints differently.
To really try and see them in a positive light.
When you think that there are organisations out there in the retail
industry who pay private, what do they call them, private shoppers -- mystery
shoppers, to go around and test the service and give feedback,
they are paying for that service.
Whereas actually all of us who have complaint systems, we can get
feedback, good and bad, about how we're doing.
So we should really try to embrace that system of complaints and learn from it.
And I use an example, some of you may have heard of a major scandal in the UK
in the last few years called the Mid Staffordshire scandal, which involved a
group of hospitals and that group of hospitals over a period of time, it has
since been found that there were a thousand, at least, unnecessary deaths,
avoidable deaths in those hospitals.
There were very serious breaches of standards, very, very serious,
the government there commissioned a massive investigation which cost
millions and got evidence from hundreds of people, etcetera.
It was awful the way people were treated, sick people in hospital,
their families, etcetera.
But during the investigation it transpired that hundreds of complaints had been
made from the very, very early days, that had those complaints been listened
to, would have immediately pointed to deficits in care.
For example, and it seems shocking, in one of the hospitals because water
wasn't being delivered to patients, they actually started a practice that water had
to be prescribed, so if a person was dehydrated the doctors actually started
prescribing water to make sure that the patient was given water every day.
Now had those simple little complaints been identified early on and responded
to, that actually could have prevented deaths later on.
We often describe complaints as the Canary in the coal mine, you'll recall or
might have read about years ago when the guys went down the mines they left
a Canary in the cage, if he keeled over that was a sign of a build up of gas and
they all got out really quickly.
We should see complaints as that, as a good warning system for us,
and we should look at them positively.
Yes, some complaints may be a little bit trivial, may be a little bit vexatious,
but mixed in with those there is often useful information for us.
And in terms of appeals, public services that provide, be it a benefit, various
different types of service, it is really critically important that they have a very
robust appeals structure in place.
Again within our office, we're learning and improving or trying to improve all the
time, where a complaint, where we don't uphold somebody's complaint to us,
we tell them that we have an internal appeals system, we ensure that
somebody new, who hasn't been involved in the examination of their
complaint to date, somebody new will be assigned this case and will relook at
it with fresh eyes, and we have an appeals manager, etcetera, we have a
structure in place, to make sure that we give it independent and proper review.
Under the Disability Act what it says about complaints is quite simple.
It says first and foremost the head of the public body has to ensure
compliance with the Disability Act.
So that's a fairly onerous responsibility on the head of the public body.
And hence if there isn't compliance, if there isn't compliance about there not
being an access officer, or if there isn't compliance around physical access or
access to information, that head of the public body is responsible,
it's very clear who is responsible.
So if there is a complaint about non-compliance with the Disability Act
the public body must appoint an inquiry officer, they must appoint an inquiry officer.
That inquiry officer then must make a determination on whether the body was
in compliance with the Act or not and must report his or her recommendation
to the head of the public body.
It is very much expected that if an inquiry officer finds that there has been
some breach, that there isn't compliance with the Disability Act, that the head of
the public body would take immediate action to rectify that.
On our website we have a number of resource tools that may be of assistance
to some of you, we have one document called, "Listen, respond, learn and
improve." Which is the ombudsman's guide to setting up and operating an
internal complaint system.
We just republished that, we revised and republished it in April of this year.
We've another document called, "Six rules for getting it right, the
ombudsman's guide to good public administration", that we just published
also this year, that is to - I suppose a standard as such, it's our standard of
what good public administration looks like, what we expect public bodies to provide.
And if you or somebody belonging to you wants to make a complaint and you're
wondering are you being reasonable or unreasonable and how should you
frame it, those resource tools can be quite useful at allowing you to do so.
I didn't want to take up too much of your time this morning, but I do promise you
that if anybody does require any additional information, there is a lot on
our website, we also have a Lo-call number and we'll be happy to make
anybody available to discuss any issue with you at any point in time.
Thank you.
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