The number of complaints made against care services increased by 17% in the past year, according to a report.
Scotland's social care regulator the Care Inspectorate received 3,788 complaints between April 2013 and March this year, up from 3,237 the previous year.
The majority of these related to services but 64 complaints were made against the Care Inspectorate itself.
Of the 1,813 complaints that were fully dealt with in the year, the largest number (856) related to care home services, according to the body's annual report.
Concern was raised about the daycare of children on 353 occasions and there were 255 complaints relating to support services.
The general health and welfare of people being cared for was the most common cause for concern, with the inspectorate contacted about this on 441 occasions.
There were 359 complaints about staff and the same number about healthcare.
During the year a total of 1,129 complains were upheld compared with 1,186 the previous year.
Overall, the number of services that received good, very good or excellent grades for quality of care and support remained at more than 92%.
The Care Inspectorate said it had focused its work on the services that presented the most risk and increased the intensity of inspections to 7,825 during the year.
Chief executive Annette Bruton said: "Where standards are not up to scratch, we will continue to seek improvement where possible and use our legal powers to protect vulnerable people from harm wherever necessary.
"Whilst the majority of care services are good, we must continue to ensure that we help improve those that are below standards, both across children's and older people's services."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article