Comments and Complaints

Your feedback shapes and maintains our service.

We are interested to hear of your views if you use our services as a professional, and if you refer your clients to us. We would be grateful if you could complete this short survey to enable us to reflect on the service we give to you.

Furthermore, we ask all of our clients to comment on their experience of using our services, and we do so for many reasons.

We think that it is essential to find out from you how we have done whilst supporting you, in order to:

• ensure we do it right
• ensure we learn from our mistakes
• ensure that we address any changes in your needs to continue to offer a service that is relevant to you
• ensure we praise those that have made a difference to you
• ensure we support and educate those that did not offer you the support we expect
• ensure we continue to receive support from funders and other agencies, to carry on with our work
• ensure we continue to receive support from funders, enabling us to offer most of our services free or at a low cost

It is an essential requirement that we have a formal process in place for you to raise any concerns or complaints, and you will see an outline of this below.

We equally find it important to register your compliments and suggestions, and we feed these back to our staff, managers and our Board, also.

COMPLIMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS

If you have a compliment or a suggestion, please use one of the following methods to let us know about it:

• Once your case closes, we send you our Feedback Questionnaires; please complete these in full and return them to us in the enclosed pre-paid envelope (you may receive one or two forms, depending on the service you have used)
• E-mail your comments to info@rstf.co.uk, for the attention of the Chief Executive Officer
• Send a letter addressed to the Chief Executive Officer (to our main address)
• Telephone either of our offices, and speak to our staff
• Visit our Facebook page and “Like” us, and score your experience, leave a comment and share our content

Whichever means you use, it is useful to include the specific service(s) you used, the area where you attended our appointments, the staff member that you would like to praise and your overall experience of the service received.

You may wish to keep your identity confidential and not include any contact details with the information that you submit to us.

If, however you would like a follow-up from us, if you would be happy to share your story and experiences with the general public, or if you would like to “give back” by other means, please do include your name and contact details, and we will be in touch.

If you would like to show your appreciation by a donation to our service, we would very much appreciate this gesture. Please contact us via the above means, to arrange this.

COMPLAINTS

Our Complaints Procedures are available here and Guidance on same is available here. Guidance for young people on how to raise a concern is available here. Please contact us if you have any questions about the process to follow.

Local Authority

You may also access the Council's own complaints procedure, only if the service you used is funded by your local authority. Please ask us to check if this is the case.

Ultimately, you have the right to raise any concerns with the National Ombudsman Service.