The Dorset Long Term Care Charter is a statement by Dorset County Council Adult and Community Services, the NHS South West Authority and various local housing authorities - the Charter will tell you about:

• The service each organisation provides
• The quality of service you should expect
• What to do if things go wrong when your expectations are not met.

A copy of the Charter can be accessed from Request Factsheets - Adult and Community Services (Social Care) under the 'General' heading.

Co-ordinated help and support from housing, health and social care services can make it easier for people to continue to live independently and for their family and friends to support them.

Our Promise to You:

We aim to provide excellent services and set ourselves standards and targets to ensure that the quality of services is maintained to the highest standard.

We hope that people will find our services:

• Helpful
• Good and reliable
• Flexible
• Easily accessible
• Good value for money
• Do not discriminate against anyone

We aim to respond to all enquiries about services promptly and efficiently by regularly monitoring our services.

We will treat you with dignity and respect at all times whoever you are.

We will be open and honest, and will respect the confidentiality of any information you may give us.

Compliments and Complaints:

Adult and Community Services staff in Dorset are committed to providing quality services to service users, their carers and families. We welcome comments from our service users as this helps us to understand what aspects of our service people like and what we should be doing differently.

We receive many more letters of appreciation than of complaints, however we do recognise that sometimes things go wrong.

If this happens, we have a complaints procedure with different stages so that we can have the opportunity to put things right and improve the service in the future.

Our factsheet "How to complain about Adult and Community Services" will give you information on how to complain and what will happen.  To access all of our factsheets please access Request Factsheets - Adult and Community Services (Social Care).

For more information please also see the Complaints about Adult and Community Services page.