Archived: Allicare Ltd

Updated 15 October 2015

We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection was planned to check whether the provider is meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.

This inspection took place on 9 September 2015 and was announced. The provider was given 48 hours’ notice because the service provides care to people within their own homes. Therefore the provider and staff operate from a central office and we needed to be sure that they would be on the premises so we could talk to them during the inspection. The inspection was carried out by two inspectors and an expert by experience who telephoned people for feedback on their care. An expert by experience is a person who has personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses this type of care service.

Before the inspection, we reviewed information that we held about the service. We had requested feedback before the inspection from the local authority safeguarding and quality assurance teams.

During this inspection, we spoke with 14 people who used the service and four relatives of people who received care from Allicare Ltd. We also spoke with eight care staff, the training and recruitment manager and a director of the service.

The records we looked at included four people’s care plans and other records relating to their care and five staff recruitment and training records. We also looked at records relating to how the provider monitored the quality of the service.

Updated 15 October 2015

This was an announced inspection that took place on 9 September 2015.

Allicare Ltd is a service that provides personal care to people in their own homes. At the time of this inspection there were 66 people using the service.

There has not been a registered manager working at the home since October 2014. A registered manager is a person who has registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Like registered providers, they are ‘registered persons’. Registered persons have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act and associated Regulations about how the service is run. The provider was in the process of recruiting a new manager.

At this inspection we found that the provider was in breach of three regulations of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. These related to failures regarding the monitoring of the quality of the service provided, a failure to implement robust recruitment processes and a failure to apply the principles of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA) when obtaining consent from people who lacked capacity to make decisions about their care.

The required recruitment checks to make sure that staff were of good character before they started working for the service had not always taken place and the quality of the service being given was not being monitored effectively by the provider. The staff and the provider were not clear about how people needed to be supported in line with the Mental Capacity Act 2005 and associated Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) where people could not consent to their own treatment to make sure that their rights were protected.

You can see what action we told the provider to take at the back of the full version of the report.

People’s individual needs and risks to their safety had been assessed but there was not always enough information in place to guide staff on what care they needed to provide people with or how to reduce these risks.

Staff had received training and support to give them the knowledge to provide people with care but it was not clear whether their competency to do this had been regularly assessed.

The staff were kind, caring and compassionate and they respected the people they cared for and treated them with dignity. They encouraged people to be as independent as they could be and they knew people well which helped them to develop caring relationships with them.

There were enough staff to provide care to people when they needed it and they knew how to protect people from the risk of abuse. The staff and provider were responsive to any changes in people’s individual care needs so they received the care they required.

Where responsible, the staff assisted people to have enough to eat and drink and helped them maintain good health.