Mr. Peter Tyndall:

The Deputy will have to remind me if I miss any points in the response. I will get Mr. Garvey and Ms Joyce to speak more about mental health issues and complaints. The reason for doing annual commentary is to make sure that things do not get lost. It is all too easy to look at a complaint, to close the subject matter in that complaint, to treat it as a one-off event and then forget about it, or to deal with a series of complaints, to get some progressive legislation in response to them, and then not watch to see whether what is promised is delivered. To give an example, with the self-cooking facilities, by going out and checking, we could see whether it was happening or not. It was not an academic point. It was not something we stopped thinking about at the point at which a decision was made to fix it. We kept doing it.

The usefulness of an Ombudsman lies in a couple of respects. First, one can let the voices of the people themselves be heard. We do that through providing the case studies within the reports. It brings to life some of the individual circumstances of people. That is quite important. One has to anonymise them to protect the individuals. If one cannot see people as people then one has problems. I will come back to the housing issue in a moment.

Regarding what one can do if a complaint is not being resolved locally, many Deputies and Senators bring complaints to my office. We are more than happy to take complaints from Deputies and Senators acting on behalf of individuals in direct provision. We generally operate two things. The first is that we ask people to complain to the provider first.

The second is that we ask that if a person is acting on behalf of another, that consent to that has been given. However, importantly, if issues arise where, for the reasons the Deputy described, it would be inappropriate to bring the complaints to the centre, we have discretion to accept them or to bypass the centre. We have discretion to accept such complaints in appropriate circumstances. It is occasionally the case, for example, that a person has genuine fears a complaint regarding a nursing home would impact on the treatment of his or her family member in the home. In such circumstances, we can take a complaint directly. We are not normally the first stop for complaints because we simply could not deal with the volumes we would get but, where circumstances require it, people can come directly to us with complaints.

We can deal with complaints about any public body, broadly speaking. The exceptions are quite narrow. We can pick up issues around healthcare, such as ancillary issues affecting people. Although matters such as banking are not in my jurisdiction and are clearly within the remit of the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman, if people complain to us about those matters, we will pursue those complaints anyway and have done so in the past. Some of those in the ombudsman community state that one's powers are what one makes of them until one is told to stop. If the law is on the side of the person or body telling one to stop, then one will probably be forced to comply. In general, we try to engage with people on their issues and raise those issues on their behalf where we can.

I am not especially familiar with the particular issue the Deputy raised regarding problems people have had on return from having received care in hospitals. We are well familiar with the issue of people having problems accessing healthcare. I will ask Mr. Garvey and Ms Joyce to address that briefly from their perspective.