Whistleblowing

Whistleblowing is the act of reporting concerns about malpractice, wrongdoing, fraud or risk that affects others. It could be something which has a negative effect on service users, the public, other staff or the organisation. Within Creative Support these issues have the potential to undermine confidence in these vital services and threaten service user and/or staff safety. Whether you are an employee, worker, employer or professional body/organisation you can raise a whistleblowing concern.

When someone blows the whistle they are raising a concern about danger or illegality that affects others (e.g. service users, members of the public, or their employer). The person blowing the whistle is usually not directly, personally affected by the danger or illegality. Consequently, the whistleblower rarely has a personal interest in the outcome of any investigation into their concern, they are simply trying to alert others. Personal grievances (eg, bullying, harassment, discrimination) are not covered by Whistleblowing unless your particular case is in the public interest. These would generally be covered by Creative Support’s internal grievance or complaints procedure.

If you have concerns as listed above, please call the Whistleblowing Line on 0161 238 7657 or 0161 236 0829 (ext. 207). If no one is available the call will divert to Reception which is staffed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A copy of Creative Support’s Whistleblowing Procedure is available below for your information.

To view our current whistleblowing policy, please see below.

We would like to thank you for raising your concerns and giving us the opportunity to investigate and act upon these.

Anonymous Concerns

While we would encourage you to give us your details so that we can a) provide an outcome and b) ask further questions if we require clarification, we respect the right of whistleblowers to report their concerns anonymously and your concerns will be dealt with anonymously if you wish them to be regardless of whether you call the above line or submit via the form, below.

Confidential Concerns

Where staff do give their identity but ask for their identity to remain confidential we would always respect their wishes, however there will be times when absolute anonymity might render us less able to investigate concerns efficiently. For instance, if staff welfare concerns were raised, we would have a duty of care to staff to notify HR to ensure we are fully supporting that member of staff as their employer.
In any cases like this, please rest assured that we would only notify key senior staff of your identity and would ensure we passed on your wishes for your concerns to be investigated in the strictest confidence.

Whistleblowing Form

Please feel free to use the form below if you either feel uncomfortable calling the above numbers or if you cannot call them for whatever reason (for instance, you are calling out of hours.) Your submission will only be visible to a very small number of staff on our internal Quality Team. Please ensure you are filling in as much information as possible when using the form and especially if you choose to submit anonymously. If you have not given us enough information to act on and have also submitted anonymously, we may be unable to adequately investigate your concerns and will not be able to contact you for further information.