Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards
DOLS online referral form letter to Care Homes
23rd February 2022
Dear colleague,
DOLS Online Referral Form for Care Homes
Firstly, we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support with DOLS. It continues to be another challenging year across social care, managing high demand and staff absences so a huge thank you to all of our colleagues on the front line who are helping to keep our Lancashire residents safe.
You may have noticed our new Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards webpage. As we move closer to Liberty Protection Safeguards (LPS), we will develop this page to share with you more information and resources that you may find useful.
In preparation for LPS we are working hard to improve how we do things. One of the changes is an on-line DOLS referral form for Care Homes. We realise that the old way of getting in contact with us is outdated, and our secure messaging service can be frustrating to use. We have attached an example of what the online referral form looks like. Here are some of things that you can do:
- Search for your Care Home by name to pre-populate the address and telephone
- Upload attachments to share with us, for example care plans, daily records and LPA documentation
- Save the form at any point and return to the saved information within 14 days
- Download a copy of your referral to print or save
The online form is similar to the Word forms you have been using. There are a few extra questions which will give us the information that we need, so you should receive less phone calls asking for additional information. The referral form will be available to use from Tuesday 1st March. You will find it on the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards webpage on the Adults Social Care section of the Lancashire County Council website:
ww.lancashire.gov.uk/health-and-social-care/adult-social-care/deprivation-of-libertysafeguards/
You will be able to submit a DOLS referral for:
- Standard Authorisation and Urgent Authorisation (form 1)
- Further Standard Authorisation (form 2)
- Review (form 10)
- Extension to an Urgent Authorisation
From 1st April we will no longer be accepting referrals made by email. Word referrals made through the old method will be returned and you will be asked to complete the online form. We know that this change will be more challenging for some Care Homes than others, and we will be individually contacting people who have previously returned by fax to see if there is any support that we can offer. It may take a few referrals for you to get use to the new format - we appreciate your co-operation as we transition.
Your feedback is really important. There will be a link to our feedback form following your referral submission. Please let us know what you think so we can improve the forms.
We would like to thank all of our Care Homes who have been involved in testing!
Yours sincerely,
Nick Clifton
DOLS Manager