CHAPTER 5Challenges in complaint handling

Introduction

This chapter looks at some of the areas we have been working on over the past two years to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of complaint handling and investigation within the office.

We recognise that if we are to continue to maintain relevance and effectiveness in a strategic manner, we need to evolve with the changing environment in which we operate. At times we criticise other agencies and recommend that they implement better and fairer systems and procedures. This underscores the importance of being rigorous in our own work practices and continually striving for improvement.

In the past two years, we have reviewed many of our internal policies and processes to evaluate their quality, consistency and accountability. As a result, we adopted a new approach to complaint resolution, created the Public Contact Team (PCT) to manage more efficiently the approaches we receive annually, and introduced a new complaints management system. We also responded to feedback on the difficulties people sometimes experience when we refer them to the agency they are complaining about, and collaborated with other ombudsmen in Australia about the management of unreasonable complainant conduct.