Scottish Ombudsman (SPSO) Decision Watchdog

Watches the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman's public Decision Report register (spso.org.uk) — the official record of complaint findings against NHS boards, local councils, housing associations, colleges, universities, prisons and the Scottish Government. The SPSO is Scotland's separate ombudsman body (distinct from the England & Wales Charity Commission / Local Government Ombudsman): it publishes every decision report it issues, with the organisation, sector, subject, outcome and date, on a free, public, keyless search page.

No login, no API key, no scraping tricks — this actor reads the same public HTML pages a visitor's browser would, respecting robots.txt (which explicitly allows this path).

What you get

One row per decision report matching your filters:

Field	Description
case_ref	SPSO case reference number
organisation	The body complained about (NHS board, council, etc.)
subject	Complaint subject/category
outcome	e.g. "Upheld, recommendations", "Not upheld, no recommendations"
report_date	Month/year the report was published
report_url	Link to the full report on spso.org.uk
summary	Full case summary text (only when "Fetch full summary text" is on)
recommendations	What SPSO asked the organisation to do (same toggle)
watch_label	Your own tag, copied onto every row
status	ok, invalid_input, http_error, network_error or parse_error

Input

• Organisation name contains — free text matched against "Body complained about" (e.g. NHS Lothian, Glasgow City Council). Leave empty for all.
• Sector — one of Colleges, Health, Health and Social Care, Housing Associations, Local Government, Prisons, Scottish Government and Devolved Administration, Universities, Water.
• Outcome contains — free text matched against the outcome label (e.g. Upheld, Not upheld).
• Report date from / to — YYYY-MM-DD, filters on the report's publication date.
• Fetch full summary text — when on (default), the actor also opens each report's own page for the case summary and recommendations (one extra request per row). Turn off for a faster, list-only run.
• Label for this watch — a tag copied onto every row, useful when several scheduled watches share one dataset.
• Maximum reports to return — stops paging once this many rows are collected (default 50, max 1000).

Example uses

• Track every new SPSO finding against a specific health board or council for a local newsroom or watchdog site.
• Monitor "Upheld" decisions across all NHS boards to spot recurring patterns.
• Build a compliance/PR alert feed for a housing association or university.

Notes

• Leave every filter empty to pull the newest decision reports across all of Scotland.
• The SPSO's own outcome list uses ~19 exact wordings (e.g. "Some upheld, action taken by body to remedy, recommendations"); this actor matches on a loose contains search against that label rather than an internal numeric ID, since those IDs are not part of any published, stable API.
• This actor covers Scotland only. It does not cover the separate Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (England) or Public Services Ombudsman for Wales.