Repair by design
About us
Address the harm® is awaiting registration as a UK charity. Income from these services supports our wider public-benefit work, including our public voice and research and influence programmes.
How do you repair by design?
We help organisations understand what they cannot currently see.
Our practical work with organisations is not simply about improving complaints handling. It is about helping you understand what your complaints reveal about trust, culture and opportunities for improvement.
Beyond complaints
Beyond complaints is our organisational-learning programme. It examines how organisations and businesses can learn from what formal complaints processes may overlook.
How do we work with organisations?
Organisational learning reviews. Structured work to understand what your complaints and feedback are telling you that you cannot currently see. Starting at £2,500.
Training. Educational programmes that help teams understand harm and what complaints reveal about trust, culture and practice. Starting at £750.
Complaints advisory. Expert-led work that helps you act on what your complaints reveal and design better responses. Starting at £600 per day.
Independent scrutiny. An independent assessment of whether your response to harm did what it set out to do, tested against the experience of the people affected rather than the process alone. Starting at £2,000.
Demonstrator partnerships. Working with organisations across sectors to test and evidence our methodology in practice. Arranged individually, and not charged at standard rates.
Corporate rates apply to organisations constituted as a Ltd, LLP or PLC.
Charity rates apply to charitable incorporated organisations, community interest companies, companies limited by guarantee, and public bodies.
What sits behind our work?
We are not another complaints procedure, advocacy service or regulator.
We work across sectors rather than within one, so you can learn from others facing similar challenges rather than only benchmarking against your own sector.
Our work is evidenced through demonstrator pilots and testing, not asserted through opinion alone.
Lived experience sits at the start of our work, not as an afterthought.
Have you made a complaint?
This page is for organisations. If you have made a complaint yourself and it has not been resolved, we cannot take on your case, but here is where to start.
Most complaints follow the same shape. You complain to the organisation first and give it the chance to put things right. If you are not satisfied with its final response, there is often an independent body, usually an ombudsman, that can review how your complaint was handled. These services are free and normally only look at a complaint once the organisation's own process has finished.
If your complaint involves more than one organisation, it can be harder to know where to go, because there is often no single body that can look at all of it. Where a complaint covers both the NHS and social care, the two ombudsmen have a joint team that can investigate them together, and it does not matter which one you contact first. For other combinations, you may need to raise your complaint with each organisation separately.
If you are not sure where to start, Citizens Advice can help you work out the routes.
If you are in immediate danger, call 999
If you need urgent emotional support, Samaritans are available 24 hours a day: 116 123 (free)