Social services once again topped the list of ministries receiving complaints through the provincial ombudsman. In her annual report, Saskatchewan ombudsman Mary MacFadyen found social service complaints are up four per cent, topping out at 906.
Many of these complaints centered on the amount of time people spent on hold with the Social Services Client Service Centre.
The report said wait times can have a significant effect on clients, such as those on the Transitional Employment Allowance, who have to call in and report how many jobs they are applying for.
There were reports of people having their benefits cut off because they were unable to report to the service centre.
“When we see a peak time coming, we’ve kind of tracked this to make sure we’re ahead of it, we do allocate some more resources over to that to make sure the call centre is able to handle the volume of calls.”
The ministry is also piloting a new online tool in Regina to allow clients to input more of this relevant information online in an effort to speed up the process.
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Merriman said once all the information is in the online portal they can make the call afterwards.
Social services critic Trent Wotherspoon proposed another option: increase call centre staff.
“It needs to be staffed properly to make sure that the response can be timely, but there must be other ways to collect this information. They’ve worked for a long time to collect some of that information electronically, but it hasn’t been launched yet,” Wotherspoon said.
“This isn’t rocket science. We should build a system across the province that allows people to patch in quickly.”
More specific complaints coming to MacFadyen’s office include people feeling they were left out of relevant information regarding their applications to social service programs.
“The cases that come to us are the ones where there’s something just a little bit different,” MacFadyen said.
“So there’s unique circumstances. They don’t necessarily fit correctly within the policy.”
A unique circumstance such as a client looking to put money into an RESP, and it was something the social workers were not familiar with.
“Lots of times if there are cases that do not fit strictly into their bureaucratic policy that’s where we have a roll,” MacFadyen said.
Recommendations given to the ministry as a result of these more specific investigations have been accepted.
The ministry and ombudsman meet several times a year to provide regular progress updates on work being done.
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