Case: 202502419
NHS organisation: Dundee Health and Social Care Partnership
Subject: Complaint handling
Outcome: Fully upheld
Date: February 2026
Summary
C raised a whistleblowing concern about proposed changes to a service within Dundee Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP). Delivery of the service had been impacted for a number of years while proposals were developed for a service re-design.
The HSCP’s whistleblowing investigation upheld two of C’s concerns and made a series of recommendations including that the HSCP consider the impact of the current lack of service delivery on vulnerable patients and services users, and consider a more strategic plan to ensure a good balance of staff and resources.
In their whistleblowing response, the HSCP committed to sharing a copy of their action plan with C. They also agreed to provide an update on the completion of the recommendations in six months’ time.
C complained to the INWO that the HSCP had not communicated with them about the action plan,as promised. They also complained that the recommendations were not being actioned and raised concern that the original service plan was proceeding instead.
We found that there had been a three month delay in providing an action plan to C and that it was only provided after C sought an update directly. We found that although the original service plan was not being progressed, only one of five whistleblowing recommendations had been fully completed by the time of our investigation (two were overdue and one was marked as ‘ongoing’). There was no evidence to suggest that meaningful progress had been made to assess the impact of the lack of service delivery, or the beginning of work to review the proposals for the service, suggesting the target date was unlikely to be met.
Our decision in this case was to uphold the complaint and we made a recommendation that the action plan be completed within a set time frame.
Recommendations
What we said should change to put things right in the future:
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The HSCP should ensure that recommendations from local whistleblowing investigations are fully actioned