Chair Hudson questions DHS on Office of Constituent Services

What role does the Office of Constituent Services or OCS plan the complaint and grievance process?

And how many people staff that office?

The Office of Constituent Services, within that office lives the Ombudsman's Office, and they are responsible for receiving

and getting those complaints out to the relevant parties and collecting them.

They are also the staff that communicate with the complainant, both first when the complaint comes in and it's assigned, and to try to close the loop once we get the response from the shelter provider.

Currently, they have 13 budgeted staff.

12 lines are full and the 13th is currently onboarding.

Great.

Thank you for that.

That may be one of the...

Best vacancy rates I've heard in a long time.

It's like you're basically almost at zero.

Soon to be, I suppose.

How does the data generated by OCS influence shelter management?

There's a strong influence both in what is communicated to the shelter and what DHS program staff do in looking at the data.

So the ombudsman office will identify shelters with concerning patterns.

They will reach out to the shelter provider.

They will reach out to DHS programs.

They will try to understand what's going on.

They also will go out and do meetings with clients about recent trends or ways to make sure that they know how to file complaints.

They report out to us monthly.

This helps us identify areas for intervention.

Is it shelter specific?

Is it staff specific?

Is it related to the provider's overall approach?

And we're also planning to integrate complaints into the incident analysis we're doing that will help us get a full picture of issues at the sites and help us to strategize

interventions to hopefully reduce both complaints and incidents as there might be an intersection.

Thank you for that.